Though it has shaped American politics for the last 40 years, the religious right still baffles reporters. Every four years, just as a presidential campaign kicks up, legions of media types who make their living outside the right-wing echo chamber emerge as a militia of Margaret Meads, descending on flyover country, trying to make sense of that exotic phenomenon, the religious right. In the end, those who actually get it are few.

James Murdoch, virtually the last man standing at News International, may not be facing jail, but he will struggle to argue his way out of this corner. When he appeared before MPs beside his father he chose a strategy of bluster and blaming others. Predictably, those others have bitten back and as a result James must be finished as a company executive in the UK. Rarely can the old line about the cover-up being worse than the original crime have been so spectacularly borne out.

In the last several months, latimes.com has seen record traffic numbers, outpacing its own internal numbers and marking pageview gains while other news organizations have seen slight decreases. In March the site had over 160 million pageviews; in May it was 189 million. And according to numbers supplied by Nielsen and comScore, latimes.com was one of the few top newspaper sites to see a year-over-year increase in uniques in June, up 5.4%.