In the lead-up to Tuesday’s testimony before Parliament by Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch (and perhaps Rebekah Brooks), stories are flying, especially the morning discovery of the death of key whistleblower Sean Hoare, who alleged phone-hacking and -spying to the New York Times in September 2010. “Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead,” reports the Guardian. “Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, was said to have been found at his Watford home.” Hertfordshire police said in a statement: “The death is currently being treated as unexplained but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing.” He told the Times “that not only did Coulson know of the phone hacking, but that he actively encouraged his staff to intercept the phone calls of celebrities in the pursuit of exclusives.” Hoare alleged to the BBC that “he was personally asked by his editor at the time, Coulson, to tap into phones. [H]e said Coulson’s insistence that he didn’t know about the practice was ‘a lie, it is simply a lie.'” The Guardian’s Nick Davies remembers Hoare in touching terms: “For better and worse, he was a Fleet Street man.” Added: NY Times adds more about Hoare’s life and career; commenters are skeptical about the circumstances of death as presently reported. [The September 2010 NYT piece is here.]

“There is not going to be a killer blow on Tuesday. Expectations are way too high,” MP Tom Watson tells the Guardian. “We will get the symbolism of parliament holding these people to account for the first time. We will look for facts, and not just offer rhetoric. This story has been like slicing a cucumber, you just get a little bit closer to the truth each time.” At the NY Times, two minutes video of David Carr and Brian Stelter offering their predictions. At The Atlantic, James Fallows considers “newspaper writers as novelists,” and suggests the stream of coverage should evoke for younger readers the sensation of “living through Watergate.” Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger at NewsBeast: “How We Broke The Murdoch Scandal.”

Tuesday’s testimony before Parliament will be streamed, at least in part, starting at 9:30am EDT/7:30am PDT on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CSPAN3  and Current.

TWITTER TRAFFIC ON HOARE’S DEATH ranges from the tasteless to the pointed to the poignant. Tasteless: Filmmaker Alejandro Adams: “News of the World Whistleblower Dead is the best news the studios developing future David Fincher projects could have received this morning.” Poignant: Guardian columnist Marina Hyde: “Utterly tragic news about my friend Sean Hoare, the first journalist to speak to me when I started as a secretary… He continued to be kind to me until the very end, and he was more special than I can possibly say.” Pointed: Journalist Peter S. Hall hits the Twitter gong just right; “It’s shit like this that makes movies like MICHAEL CLAYTON seem perfectly plausible.” Still, comedy writer Simon Blackwell (“The Thick of It,” Four Lions) tweets, “All of this would have been rejected at initial meeting stage as being too outlandish.” NYTimes Culture Editor Adam Sternberg has ink, or pixels, in his veins: “Irony of Murdoch tabloid hacking scandal is we don’t get to see how Murdoch tabloids would cover it. My guess: mercilessly and relentlessly.” Adweek reporter Emma Bazilian: “My dad on recent NOTW happenings: ‘Jesus, that is some Stieg Larsson shit!'” Comics writer Matt Fraction: “dont worry. scotland yard & the british press are on the case”. And: “Twitter suggests #hackgate’s destiny is a TV series a la Wire/State of Play/the Killing. Too much for one movie,” tweets Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland.

The Sun’s website was hacked.

“Rupert Murdoch gives me exclusive insight into how he is feeling,” former News of the World editor Piers Morgan retweets Vanity Fair journalist Vicky Ward about his appearance on Morgan’s CNN program tonight. News Corporation independent directors ask questions as stock slumps: “Venture capital executive Tom Perkins and Viet Dinh, a law professor at Georgetown University who was the chief architect of the USA Patriot Act, are leading the efforts of independent directors… News Corp.’s independent directors, who hold nine of 16 board seats, have expressed frustration over the quality and quantity of information they’ve received about the scandal and concern about management’s ability to handle the crisis given how slowly the company has responded.”

BAG LADY. From the Guardian, around 1pm PDT Monday:  “Detectives are examining a computer, paperwork and a phone found in a bin near the riverside London home of Rebekah Brooks… The Guardian has learned that a bag containing the items was found in an underground car park in the Design Centre at the exclusive Chelsea Harbour development on Monday afternoon. The car park, under a shopping centre, is yards from the gated apartment block where Brooks lives with her husband, [a] close friend of the prime minister David Cameron. It is understood the bag was handed into security at around 3pm and that shortly afterwards, Brooks’s husband, Charlie, arrived and tried to reclaim it. He was unable to prove the bag was his and the security guard refused to release it.” [More at the link.] Novelist William Gibson, who coined the word “cyberspace,” tweets, “If hackgate were a screenplay, this would be the point where the writers need a firm guiding hand. Laptop in bin feels phoned in.” Later: Guardian deputy editor Ian Katz tweets that Brooks’ husband “says bag belonged to him not Rebekah. Spokesman says: “A cleaner thought it was rubbish and put it in the bin.” Plus: Reuters’ Brooks Special Report as a PDF.

National Review Online senses liberal sharks and “Fox News haters” in the water. DealBook looks at the U.S. laws NewsCorp may be exposed to. The Nation’s Leslie Savan repeats the repeatedly-denied rumors that American phones were hacked by Fox News.

Jo Becker and Ravi Samaiya go 2,400 words in the NY Times with “Murdoch Aides Long Tried to Blunt Scandal Over Hacking,” after interviewing “dozens of current and former News Corporation employees and others involved in the multiple hacking inquiries.” Revelations include Rebekah Brooks hoping to unearth dirt on rivals. “Over the last several months, Ms. Brooks spearheaded a strategy that seemed designed to spread the blame across Fleet Street, interviews show. Several former News of the World journalists said that she asked them to dig up evidence of hacking. One said in an interview that Ms. Brooks’s target was not her own newspapers, but her rivals… “They thought it was unfair that all the focus was on The News of the World,” said one News International official with knowledge of the effort… [Daily Mail editor ] Mr. Dacre confronted Ms. Brooks over breakfast at the plush Brown’s hotel. “You are trying to tear down the entire industry,” Mr. Dacre told her, according to an account he relayed to his management team.” And: The evidence missed by the head of Scotland Yard before his resignation.

CLASS ASSETS: Nomura analyst Michael Nathanson said the current crisis could work to investors’ benefit, if NewsCorp were “split into three parts – good, bad and toxic – and suggested that management use the current phone hacking crisis to explore a possible sale of assets.” [THR.] Another analysis of the Nomura numbers, from FT’s Alphaville.

Reuters columnist Hugo Dixon says James Murdoch ought not be forced out of his role atop BSkyB. “Admittedly, Murdoch Jr hasn’t covered himself in glory in handling the alleged phone hacking and police bribery scandal. As well as being chairman of BSkyB, he has indirect responsibility at News Corp for the UK newspaper arm. He was slow to grip the problems — not least by allowing Rebekah Brooks, who ran the papers and reported to him, to stay in her position for too long. There are now multiple probes into the saga which could embroil him further. But nothing has yet come out which should disqualify him from his BSkyB role.”

Reuters’ Felix Salmon considers what could place NewsCorp into play. 9/11 family members petition FBI and DOJ to be included in American NewsCorp inquiry.

Ladbrokes’ bookies offer 8/1 odds on Prime Minister Cameron leaving office (down from 100/1).

FOR THE OPPOSITION: Labour leader Ed Miliband makes a speech on the “need for responsibility”: “Ultimately, it was about individuals who had forgotten their fundamental responsibility to their fellow human beings. But it wasn’t just the particular individuals who perpetrated these actions… Because we also have to explain, why it was so widespread, so systematic and why it wasn’t stopped. Why did News International engage in denial for so long?H ow could Rupert Murdoch say they have handled these allegations “extremely well” with “only minor mistakes”? I think the answer is simple: this was an organization which thought it was beyond responsibility. Its power was so immense, its influence so great, from Prime Ministers downwards. Nobody confronted them. Nobody held them to account. Nobody seemed willing to really challenge them. Not the police, not most frontline politicians, nor most of the press. An organization whose newspapers demanded greater responsibility among the powerless in our society, believed it was so powerful that it was beyond that self-same responsibility .It was one of the great failures of politics that their power went unchallenged for so long. For all that the reputation of politics has been damaged of late, who else can stand up to powerful interests? That is part of what politics is for. We cannot allow it to happen again. And we must also make sure we get to the bottom of the relationships between the press and the police.”

[Text here, 21:06 video below.]

GOOD ON YOU: In the Independent, Tim Lott considers the role bullies have, and will continue to have, in British society. “We may celebrate now, but the true celebration will only come when the political classes prove that they can hang on to their (very) recently discovered guts. Then we could have politicians we respect, and who, moreover, respect themselves.”

BROKEN BAD: Dennis Potter suffered physical infirmities until the end of his life, when he was quaffing draughts of morphine from a flask to stem the pain from terminal cancer. He insisted he had two miniseries to finish, which he did. In a last-testament interview with Mervyn Bragg (1994), he said he had named his cancer “Rupert.” The Guardian posted a 3:33 extract, including that dark musing, in 2007. Below, Mr. Potter’s words for Mr. Murdoch, addressing what he saw, in his waning days, as “the pollution of the British press.” “How can we have a mature democracy when newspapers and television, whether standard television or cable, are beginning to be so interlaced in ownership terms? How are our freedoms to be guaranteed? Who is going to guarantee them?”

“The Hack” is an occasional column of media commentary.

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