A Murdoch Monday

Rupert Murdoch spent the weekend bragging about his new Sunday Sun and rejoicing in the publication of the Teacher Data Reports in New York City.

But has hasn't had such a good Monday:

LONDON - Rupert Murdoch's top-selling U.K. tabloid, The Sun, had a culture of making illegal payments to corrupt public officials in return for stories, a senior police officer said Monday, as Murdoch announced that the paper's first-ever Sunday edition had sold more than 3 million copies.

Sue Akers, a Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner, told Britain's media ethics inquiry that the newspaper openly referred to paying its sources and that such payments had been authorized at a senior level.

Her comments came the day Murdoch's company paid former teen singing sensation Charlotte Church 600,000 pounds ($951,000) in a phone-hacking settlement for violating her and her family's privacy.

...

Church's settlement Monday resolved her claim that 33 News of the World articles were the product of journalists illegally hacking into her family's voicemails. Despite her legal victory, Church said years of tabloid intrusions followed by years of legal battles had horrified her.

"What I have discovered as the litigation has gone on has sickened and disgusted me. Nothing was deemed off limits by those who pursued me and my family, just to make money for a multinational news corporation," she said outside London's High Court.

At one point, Church's mother attempted suicide after Murdoch's papers reported that Church's father was having an affair.

That got the information from a hacked voicemail.

Nice work, Rupert.

It also turns out that News Corp. executives knew as far back as 2006 about phone hacking and other corruption but did nothing about the problems:

Senior executives of Murdoch's British newspaper division, including former News of the World editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, have always insisted they were unaware of widespread phone hacking at the tabloid, even though private investigator Glenn Mulcaire was jailed briefly in 2007 for eavesdropping on royal aides on behalf of the tabloid.

But an email from the News of the World's then-lawyer, Tom Crone, submitted to the inquiry suggests that both Coulson — who later became Prime Minister David Cameron's communications chief — and Brooks knew in 2006 that police had a list of around 100 people who may have been targeted by Mulcaire.

So much for plausible deniability by the News Corp. braintrust.

A former deputy prime minister gets at the root problem of all of this corruption in Britain:

Former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, whose own phone hacked by the News of the World, accused Murdoch of having a corrupting influence on British politics.

"I always thought it wrong that politicians at the highest level were so close to Murdoch, because Murdoch asked a price," Prescott told justice Brian Leveson's inquiry. "I thought it gave a kind of corrupting influence — not in the payment sense but in the power sense."

Indeed.

And Murdoch has enjoyed the same kind of corrupting influence here in the United States too.

Clearly the influence he has over the Republican Party through FOX News is enormous, but the corruption infects the other party too.

Just ask Fred Dicker's best pal, Andrew Cuomo, about that corruption.

He'll tell you - if he can get his lips off Fred Dicker's ass first.