As The Times (ahem, The New York Times) reported, “it was not immediately clear whether Mr. Murdoch’s American newspaper and publishing interests would be affected by the moves announced Saturday.” But Murdoch’s American businesses, including the newspapers, exist in a similar corporate structure. For example, Dow Jones and Co., which News Corp. purchased in 2007 for $5 billion, publishes The Wall Street Journal. Murdoch is both CEO and chairman of News Corp., the parent company, and chairman of the board of directors of Dow Jones.

But isn’t News Corp. splitting up anyway?

Yes, on June 28, News Corp. announced that it would be splitting into two companies and that Murdoch would chair both of them. One company would contain the newspaper and publishing businesses, while the other would have the media and entertainment interests. Murdoch would remain CEO only of the latter company, but will initially be chairman of both. The split is expected to take a year to become finalized. In a statement by News Corp., Murdoch’s resignations were described as “corporate house-cleaning exercise prior to the company split."

Why is News Corp. splitting up?

Now Murdoch is gone from both. But he will still hold sway over the newspapers under their toothless grip. He is also walking away from the News International board, the London corporate brolly for all his U.K. newspapers. That might seem more significant. But, again, it’s pretty much a corporate shell, and the CEO will still report directly to Murdoch in New York.

Murdoch spin doctors in the U.S. described the move as a “corporate house-cleaning exercise” prior to News Corp. being split into an entertainment company (including all the Fox brands) and a publishing company (which will encompass his U.S., U.K., and Australian newspapers). I’m inclined to believe them. After all, they even admitted the boards were of minor importance.

The entertainment and publishing divisions will become publicly quoted companies, and Murdoch will chair both. He will be CEO of the entertainment company only, but he hasn’t been CEO of his U.K. newspapers for two decades—and that hasn’t made his grip on them any less vicelike.

The fact is Murdoch will still be chairman of the largest newspaper group in the world after the split. His interest in Britain might be waning—especially now that he’s largely persona non grata among the London political elite after the hacking scandal—but the publishing company will include The Wall Street Journal, which he acquired only a few years ago and which is now the main reason he gets out of bed very early every morning. He’s not about to sell that any time soon.

Previously, such a converged media, TV, and newspaper project had formed the basis for James Murdoch’s bid for succession. Project Rubicon—James’s strategic plan to relocate and converge the British newspaper titles with the BSkyB franchise as part of a $16 billion takeover—was abandoned nearly a year ago in the wake of the hacking scandal.

Mark Lewis, the campaigning lawyer who through years of protracted civil suits finally brought phone hacking to public attention, told The Daily Beast: “Although surprising, it was inevitable that the board of News Corp. would call a halt to the family control of the print media in the U.K. when that was harming the running of an international company ... It was time for a change,” Lewis said. “People are left having to clear up the mess made on his watch.”

Murdoch himself has yet to issue any public statement, though his Twitter account has been active with unrelated political conversation. An email sent to his British staff today maintains Murdoch "remains fully committed to our business as chairman."

There have been 70 arrests since the hacking scandal broke in July last year. Scotland Yard’s phone-hacking investigation, Operation Weeting, focused mainly on Murdoch’s bestselling Sunday tabloid News of the World, has nearly finished, and files are being handed over to prosecutors. A separate inquiry into corruption of public officials, which has resulted in more than a dozen arrests at the daily Sun, is only about halfway through. Meanwhile, the computer-hacking investigation, Operation Tuleta, is only really just underway. Well-placed sources in Westminster suggest the upmarket Sunday Times is a particular focus when it comes to email hacking, with the security services in Northern Ireland taking a particular interest.

The small news company will be worth somewhere between $2 billion and $5 billion, while the giant pay-TV, cable, and broadcasting arm will be worth around $50 billion. What will it be called? Entertainment Corp.?

For all the eulogies about Rupert Murdoch being the “last great newspaperman,” the truth is that the “man who owned the news” always had a canny eye for non-news values and outlets. In the early ’60s, Murdoch was buying in and out of Australian TV networks, just as his father had acquired radio stations before World War II. Murdoch’s move to Britain with the purchase of the now shuttered News of the World and The Sun in 1969 was accompanied by an abortive attempt to gain a controlling interest in the London Weekend Television, one of the prime commercial TV stations of the time. When acquiring the Times Newspaper Group, Murdoch bought up the satellite broadcaster that would become the basis of BSkyB.

The media mogul is thus one of the pioneers of the concept of “infotainment.” Back in 1983, when challenged about why his once prestigious Sunday Times had fallen for the hoax of some forged diaries of Adolf Hitler, Murdoch famously responded, “After all, we are in the entertainment business.”

With the news and the entertainment businesses about to be radically split from each other, another contradiction in the Murdoch project has been exposed. Just as he inherited a (small) part of Keith Murdoch’s extensive Australian newspaper interests in the ’50s, Rupert Murdoch has tried to engineer a dynastic succession at News Corp.

Addressing the court Friday, Brooks’s lawyer, Hugo Keith, said the extensive media scrutiny of Brooks to date might have ruined her chances for a fair trial. “I am afraid there are certain sites, blogs and the like, where there has been some extremely offensive, unpleasant and prejudicial commentary,” he said, according to the Telegraph.

This echoed comments made by both Brooks and her husband after the charges against them were announced last month. Appearing with her husband, Brooks said she was “baffled by the decision to charge me,” calling the decision to charge her “weak and unjust.” She added, “I cannot express my anger enough that those close to me have unfairly been dragged into this.”

In his own remarks, Charlie Brooks was equally defiant, complaining that his wife was “the subject of a witch hunt” and that he and the others had been used as “scapegoats” to ratchet up pressure on her. “I have grave doubts that my wife will ever get a fair trial, given the volume of biased commentary which she has been subject to,” he said.

Before the line of questioning had even arrived at this point, Cameron was refuting the allegation, made by former prime minister Gordon Brown, that there had been a quid pro quo of support for James Murdoch's commercial interests in News International’s controversial bid for the British broadcaster BSkyB in return for the media empire’s switch from supporting Brown’s Labour government to Cameron’s Tories. But Jay honed in on a series of meetings in the summer of 2009, when the Sun switched to supporting Cameron's bid to be next prime minister and Conservative policy towards the BBC and broadcasting regulation seemed to chime more with the demands famously made by Murdoch in a MacTaggart lecture in 2009. Cameron made a vigorous defense of his own independent policy-making—and angrily insisted he hadn't done any kind of deal. When Jay suggested there could be a “perception” of such a concordat, Cameron pushed back, saying that vague perceptions of “winks and nods” could easily decline into a "trial for witchcraft."

As so often in the past, however, it's not the much-rehearsed verbal performance that will dominate the headlines, but the unexpected written evidence that emerges through the Leveson Inquiry's Section 21 powers to subpoena materials. Today, the surprise source was News International, which holds a back-up of the texts sent by Brooks, its former CEO. The “in this together” text was sent by Brooks to Cameron just before he was to give a speech at the Conservative party conference. “I am so rooting for you tomorrow not just as a proud friend but because professionally we're definitely in this together!” Brooks wrote. Then she signed off, “Speech of your life? Yes he Cam!”

Cameron responded that the text indicated that, while he and Brooks were indeed “friends,” he and the Sun were “pushing the same agenda.”

In the most emotionally charged part of his appearance, Brown “absolutely” denied he had given Brooks, then editor of The Sun, permission to reprint details of his son Fraser’s cystic fibrosis on the front page within days of it being diagnosed in 2006. Brown claimed he was presented with a “fait accompli” by Brooks, and that no parent would willingly divulge such confidential material about a child, especially since he was only 4 months old at the time, and other relatives—who could be directly affected by an inherited illness like this—had not been told.

During a parliamentary appearance last year during the height of the hacking scandal, Gordon Brown alleged his son’s medical records had been illegally accessed. The Sun denied this at the time, and under oath Brooks claimed that the information had come from a concerned member of the public, who also had a child with cystic fibrosis.

Brooks’s justification for publishing the story was that it raised public awareness of the disease and increased charitable donations to the Cystic Fibrosis Trust, though the chief executive of the charity has denied this, according to a Reuters report today.

Smith resigned as Hunt’s adviser in April once the level of “inappropriate” contact was revealed, but the Parliamentary furor did not die down.  Hunt’s opposite number, Labour Party front-bencher Harriet Harman, called for his resignation: under the ministerial code, she reasoned, Hunt was responsible for his aide. But Hunt is a close ally of the prime minister, and David Cameron declared that he should be allowed his day in court before any other ministerial investigations are launched.

It has been a wavering, uncertain performance today as Hunt explained how he was unaware of what “quasi-judicial” meant until late December 2010, when he was handed control of the process.  The counsel to the inquiry, Robert Jay, put together a sequence of phone calls, emails and texts that effectively showed a constant interchange between senior ministers and the top echelons of News Corp. during this time. Though Hunt’s legal advisers told him not to meet with James Murdoch, for instance, Hunt spoke to him on the phone, and though he was advised not to lobby in favor of the bid, Hunt immediately wrote a passionate memo to Cameron doing exactly that. Hours before he took over the bid, Hunt texted James Murdoch following news that the European competition commission had decided not to investigate the bid: "Great and congrats on Brussels, just Ofcom to go."

However, it’s not just the judgment of the culture secretary that is at stake.  New text message evidence today revealed just how intimately the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, who is one of Cameron’s closest allies, was involved in the bid. As soon as Cable was revealed to be “at war” with the Murdochs in December 2010, Hunt texted Osborne complaining of the “acute bias” of the business minister.  Fifty minutes later, when the remit to oversee the bid was awarded to Hunt, Osborne replied, “I hope you like the solution!”

Osborne has not yet been called to the inquiry, though Cameron is expected to appear in two weeks’ time. Given today’s evidence, it seems likely that Osborne will have to appear soon as well. The questioning then turned to the relationship between Hunt, his special adviser Adam Smith, and the News Corp. lobbyist Frederic Michel, who was in contact up to five times a day with Smith throughout the first half of 2011, until News Corp.’s bid was finally dropped in the wake of the hacking scandal.