Rupert Murdoch’s scion 38-year-old James Murdoch came up to a parliamentary committee for questioning again today after his first appearance this past summer. The shine is definitely off News Corp. Reporters are digging up the dirt on News Corp.’s operations in both the UK and the US. There was October’s scandal about goosed circulation numbers at the Wall Street Journal for which a senior European executive was fired. And then last week’s scandal of a reporter at The Sun who was arrested for bribing police officers.

This week’s issue of The Week has an excerpt from Roger Ebert’s new memoir in which Ebert describes his friendship with legendary Chicago journalist Mike Royko.

I’d written a few reviews for my college newspaper, but being a movie critic was not my career goal. If I had one at all, it was to become a columnist like Royko. When the Daily News folded in 1978, Mike worked at the Sun-Times until Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in late 1983. This was a crushing blow to Mike. He went home and had a few drinks, and when the local TV stations brought their cameras into his den, he announced that a Murdoch paper was “not fit to wrap fish in.”