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Abstract

As the scandal over Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation’s illegal phone hacking activities broke to television audiences around the world, I could not help but wonder why?’And I am sure many others asked themselves the same question. What prompted Murdoch’s executives to condone illegal activities aimed at listening into private conversations? Obvious, you might say: getting the latest scoop on a murder investigation, or the most salacious titbit about the royal family. But let us delve deeper and ask again, as a child might, why? So that more readers would read the News of the World, of course! Stupid question? What drove so many people, estimated at over 4 million, a significant fraction of Britain’s population, to follow the tabloid press so avidly? The daily newspaper remains a primary source of news for the vast majority of the world’s population. Of course, most people also read more serious papers than the News of the World. Still, what is it that drives some news items to become headlines rather than be relegated to the corner of an inside page? The scientific answer is Information; capitalized here because there is more to the term than as understood in its colloquial usage. You may call it voyeurism in the case of News of the World, or the hunger to know what is happening around the world for, say, the New York Times. Both forms of enquiry suffer from the need to filter the vast numbers of everyday events that take place every second, so as to determine those that would most likely be of interest to readers. The concept of Information is best illustrated by comparing the possible headlines ‘Dog Bites Man’ and ‘Man Bites Dog’. Clearly the latter, being a far rarer event, is more likely to prompt you to read the story than the former, more commonplace occurrence. In 1948, Claude E. Shannon published a now classic paper entitled ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’. By then the telegraph, telephone, and radio had spawned a whole new communications industry with the AT&T company at its locus. Shannon, working at AT&T Bell Laboratories, was concerned with how fast one could communicate meaning, or information in its colloquial sense, over wires or even the wireless.