Sitting before a parliamentary committee, facing questions about phone-hacking, in his own words "humble", Rupert Murdoch did not look much like the sinister potentate of popular fable. His son James, often interjecting protectively in his father's testimony, reinforced the impression of waning power. At the height of his imperial majesty, Mr Murdoch would never have appeared at such a hearing; he never would have been invited. The questioning itself was, for the most part, disappointingly tame. But the very fact of the summons shows how MPs are casting off their longheld fear of News International.

That is a remarkable moment in British politics. Whether it amounts to a transformative liberation depends on what now happens to Mr Murdoch's newspapers. The News of the World has closed; speculation about its replacement by a similar Sunday tabloid remains just that. The Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times all continue to operate ostensibly as before, but chastened and disoriented by the proprietor's disgrace. News Corp shareholders must be made anxious by volatile trading. Phone-hacking has not trashed their stock, but it has forced a discount.

Mr Murdoch started out in newspapers and has a nostalgic affection for print. The rest of the group is less romantic. Of its British newspaper properties the News of the World was the cash cow and that is slaughtered. The cold rationale for owning other titles is to influence politicians in ways that suit the company's commercial interests. That mechanism is under sustained attack and is likely to be constrained by regulations forcing greater transparency. News Corp might reasonably now decide that British papers are no longer a worthwhile investment.

What would the impact be of such a retreat? What should it be? The answers to those two questions are, sadly, quite different. There is no natural law to dictate that the demise of conservative titles must benefit liberal ones, nor that the exposure of sleazy journalistic practices augurs a renaissance of principled newsgathering.

Nonetheless, News International has led the way in making our popular media coarse, its treatment of public figures aggressive and the discussion of policy parochial and duplicitous. Our politicians have pandered to that agenda. As Rafael Behr writes, on page 24, the cosiness between News International and government is part of a wider crisis in democratic representation. The phone-hacking scandal has laid bare how power is traded to the exclusion of the electorate. Even if David Cameron escapes serious censure for his judgement in hiring Andy Coulson, his participation in a corrupt culture of opaque influence is undeniable.

Mr Cameron has built a career from superficial gestures and tactical positioning. He has travelled an extraordinary distance without ever being forced to explain, with much intellectual clarity or rigour, his political credo. His professional training is, after all, as a PR executive. The possibility of such a smooth ascent, based on so little, is itself an expression of the infantile political discourse that has characterised the British press for too long, and the engine of that infantilism has been News International. With Mr Murdoch's influence diminished perhaps our politics can grow up.