It’s been a very bad few weeks for Rupert Murdoch. A short while ago, Murdoch’s News Corporation was mounting a takeover bid for BSkyB. His newspapers sat atop circulation and advertising revenue charts in the British tabloid marketplace. His position at the media world’s head table seemed absolutely untouchable.

Now, what started as allegations of News of the World journalists hacking into celebrities’ telephones has escalated into an FBI investigation of reports that 9/11 victims’ families’ telephones were also targeted, and Mr Murdoch and his son James being summoned to appear before the Commons Media Committee to answer questions on the scandal.

With, at time of writing, nine staff at the now closed News of the World having been questioned by police on allegations of phone hacking, the escalating scandal threatens to embroil Murdoch himself in its scale, and do previously unimaginable damage to his position on the media throne.

If his empire were to fall, or suffer serious damage, could it be because of a sea-change in British attitudes to tabloid journalism, or could it precipitate that change?

The News of the World’s fate, though, has shown that not even such a dominant force as it was is safe from the wrath of its own readership if it gets things as badly wrong as it appears to have. The question, though, has to be asked whether the British public are entitled to the righteous fury which has brought it down. The News of the World’s content and editorial style changed dramatically in its 168 years.

The text-heavy, densely news-based front page of 1843 bore little resemblance to the celebrity obsessed, garish front pages of the last few years, which screamed sex and gossip but carried little real news. Clearly the imperatives of the paper’s editors in 21st century Britain were rather different from those of Henry Drake Breun when it launched, and the number of people who continued to buy it in a shrinking market, in the face of ferocious competition from a 24-hour, mobile news media environment, backed up that stance.

A press which can, and has, exposed corruption, financial mendacity, crime and hypocrisy, some time in the mid-1980s, became fixated on ‘news’ of who was having sex with whom, celebrity relationships and sensationalist scare-mongering. The News of the World was in the vanguard of this change, and the reading public lapped it up. Did those 2.65 million people who bought the News of the World in its final months think about how their celebrity ‘news’ were gathered? And did they care? The British public’s attitudes to phone hacking may well have been considerably different if it had been a necessary tool in the exposure of wrong-doing that had traditionally been the pursuit of investigative journalists, but the power and efficacy of those nefarious methods have been grossly misappropriated to satisfy the voracious appetite for tittle-tattle.

Britons seem to have tolerated this misuse until it crossed some line that wasn’t even apparent until, oddly appropriately, other parts of the media exposed it. The alleged tampering with murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s mobile telephone seemed the tipping point, after which revelation after revelation has come spilling out of this enormous can of worms, to the horror of an appalled public who only days before, in their millions, were reading the paper that was guilty of such gross intrusions on both private grief and police investigations. Indeed, it admitted as much.

"Phones were hacked, and for that this newspaper is truly sorry... there is no justification for this appalling wrongdoing,” lamented the News of the World’s final editorial. Fine sentiments, but given the success of its approach, placing it at the top of the Sunday newspaper food chain, can we reasonably expect that allegations against other newspapers, from other publishing groups, will not surface before too long?

Since it seems likely that, far from being an isolated outrage, this type of malpractice is probably undertaken by other parts of our press, are we entitled to such outrage if we are guilty, by endorsing such acts in purchasing of the papers which commit them, of perpetuating them, even of causing them? The nature of the coverage of the scandal itself has been sufficiently hysterical in some quarters that it seems unlikely that any complete change in the face of the tabloid press is imminent. News International have recently, even before the closure of the News of the World, registered thesunonsunday.co.uk and thesunonsunday.com, suggesting they themselves will attempt to fill the enormous chasm left in Sunday newspaper sales. The Sun is not likely to differ greatly in any Sunday incarnation from its daily version, so the public response, and the sales it garners if it treads the same path the News of the World did, will be hugely important in encouraging any change.