Richard Lutz takes a look at the Murdoch debacle. And finds rot at the top

Like a snake that devours its own tail, Rupert Murdoch is gobbling down the very troops that helped build his tawdry UK media empire.

His ‘independent’ investigators, called the Management and Standards Committee, have handed over name after name of alleged miscreants who tapped phones, paid over dosh to cops and played pretty fast and nasty in the haste to get the scoop on politicians they didn’t like, celebrities and sports stars.

Suddenly, after raking in the seedy cash from their dubious  methods, the journalists are marginalised and- basically- ratted on by their own paymasters.

Murdoch has launched these stooges in the same manner that the Wicked Witch of the North sent out those flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz. Away they go with the boss’s OK to finally let fly at the army of reporters who fed the beast.

Murdoch is a traitor to his own employees. He and his horde of deranged news staff snooped through the keyholes of others’ lives- knowing damn well it sold papers to a salacious and moronic public.

Now, b-a-n-g, he’s telling another group of his workers (pretty high paid ones at that) to name names and let the very uniformed police forces that took the cash to arrest them in dawn raids.

It makes great copy. Especially if you were a victim. Or a journalist who always decried these underhanded, cynical and creepy methods.

After all, any reporter in any city in the UK knew damn well that The Sun (and its ludicrous stablemate The News of the World) got many of its admitted exclusives- especially the crime tinged ones- through annual pay offs to insider cops.

Now, the snake bites back. It’s eating itself. And his news staff are finding out just how he valued their devious methods