In the UK private detectives supplied the facts says former red top news exec Alistair Campbell; "they were in a sense replacing journalists, because the private detectives could do things the journalists can't". Jonathan Rees was one such private detective. A suspect in an axe murder investigation and a convicted criminal, he supplied information to the News of the World for several years, running a full-time business from it. Not only that but he'd been re-hired straight out of prison, having served a sentence for trying to frame an innocent woman in a custody case ... by planting drugs on her, just to get a story.

But phone hacking and planting drugs weren't the only methods used. Bribing corrupt policemen who would provide the kind of private information guaranteed to win the reporter a prime spot in the paper was another. All these tools formed part of an endemic surveillance operation that covered kidnap victims, celebrities, police investigators and politicians.

In fact it was the complex network of corruption that the News of the World had built up that allowed the paper to get away for so long with the claim that the scandal was all the work of a single reporter. "News International managed to get its filthy, slimy tentacles in every nook and cranny of the Metropolitan police and to all intents and purpose that corrupted it." So when an investigation was launched the police didn't look too hard and then refused to re-open the case.

But then a Guardian journalist, Nick Davies, published a story about the News of the World hacking into murder victim Milly Dowler's phone. It shifted the weight of public feeling and the vice-like grip that Murdoch had held over British politics suddenly loosened. "MPs in flocks crossed the floor, deserting the previous alliance."

As the walls now close in on the Murdoch empire this shocking film lays bare the full extent of corruption in the tabloid paper. How could Murdoch have possibly been ignorant of such widespread criminality?