For ordinary people, tabloid journalism is often just a source of tawdry diversion. But for political and business elites, control over gossip can be a source of real power. One of the benefits of Donald Trump’s recent criminal court case, which earned him 34 convictions of falsifying business records, is that it illuminated the former president’s dealings in the murky world of tabloid blackmail. The testimony of former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, an aptly named sleaze specialist, confirmed the earlier reporting of journalist Ronan Farrow that the scandal sheet engaged in the practice of catch-and-kill, gathering dirt on figures such as Trump with a view toward suppression rather than reporting.

Keeping secrets is a good way to build alliances, and Trump’s concordat with The National Enquirer was serious enough that the tabloid helped him by going after his political foes Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz. In the 2016 presidential primaries, The Enquirer even suggested, hilariously—but, it must be acknowledged, falsely—that Cruz’s father might have had a played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Pecker’s newspaper went all out for Trump because his victory meant it had an invaluable asset: a president indebted to it for keeping his secret.

Still, when it comes to running a journalistic protection racket, David Pecker is a small potato compared to the true transatlantic shogun of this dark art, press baron Rupert Murdoch. The Australian-born tycoon’s holdings are vast, ranging from Fox News and tabloid fare (the New York Post in the United States and The Sun in England) to quality broadsheets that aspire to be the voice of respectable conservativism (The Wall Street Journal and its British counterparts, The Times and The Sunday Times). These varied assets allow Murdoch a unique audience that extends across economic lines. He can reach both the masses and the upper classes.

Behind this public influence lies a more covert but no less real source of power. As parliamentary hearings in the United Kingdom in 2011 made clear, for decades journalists at Murdoch’s British newspapers—notably The News of the World but also including The Sunday Times—engaged in illegal and wildly unethical practices (including phone hacking and bribery of police) in order to gather news stories..

The Murdoch phone-hacking scandal was never satisfactorily resolved: The profitable News of the World was shuttered, and there were a few high-profile resignations (notably, in 2011, of Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of Murdoch’s umbrella company News International). But since Murdoch’s larger empire survived unscathed, these were symbolic acts of contrition. (In fact, Brooks herself returned in 2015 as CEO of News UK, the newly minted name of News International).

The lack of accountability in the News International scandal can also be seen by the fact that two prominent participants in Murdoch’s dirty deeds are now taking the helm of one of the crown jewels of American journalism, The Washington Post. Will Lewis is the paper’s new publisher and Robert Winnett has been named as the incoming editor. The two men are longtime accomplices, having worked together at The Sunday Times.

On Saturday, The New York Times reported, “The publisher and the incoming editor of The Washington Post, when they worked as journalists in London two decades ago, used fraudulently obtained phone and company records in newspaper articles, according to a former colleague, a published account of a private investigator and an analysis of newspaper archives.”

One particularly disturbing aspect of this report is that in the past Lewis has been disingenuous about his record, falsely maintaining that his only involvement with the scandal was as a reformer trying to clean up The Sunday Times. Lately, however, he’s been acting more like a Nixon-style politician caught in a scandal, opting to stonewall and deceive rather than come clean.

Addressing accusations that he and Winnett paid a source $120,000 for information in a story about a British government scandal, Lewis told journalists at The Washington Post, “I agreed to put money in escrow for legal protections” of the source. According to The New York Times, this is denied by the security consultant who handled the story, who bluntly asserts, “It was not an escrow account. I held it and I released it when and how I thought it was needed.”

On June 7, National Public Radio reporter David Folkenflik reported that Lewis “repeatedly—and heatedly—offered to give me an exclusive interview about the Post’s future, as long as I dropped” a story about his involvement in the phone-hacking scandal.