The more we read of the contretemps over the behavior of the Murdoch newspapers in London, the more it looks to us like the real scandal is the behavior of the British government. Feature the finding of the parliamentary panel that has just declared — as the New York Times headline phrased — “Murdoch Unfit To Lead Media Empire.” Can The New York Sun be the only voice that finds it outrageous that some panel of parliamentarian pecksniffs is ruling on who is and isn’t fit to own a newspaper? The next thing you know one will need a license to write.

The parliamentary report was issued this morning and is a long document. “On the basis of the facts and evidence before the Committee,” it harrumphed, “we conclude that, if at all relevant times Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone-hacking, he turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications. This culture, we consider, permeated from the top throughout the organization and speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International.”

Then the supposedly damning sentence: “We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.” But it turns out that the committee’s conclusion is not dispositive. This is not Soviet Russia, and the shareholders of the major international company that Mr. Murdoch heads have their own standing to determine who is and is not their head. And the parliamentary committee itself was divided, on precisely the point about Rupert Murdoch’s allegedly inadequate fitness to run a major international company.

We are not inclined to endorse methods of the British reporting in the hey day of Fleet Street, when phones were hacked and quotes manufactured and the relationship between the partisan press and the government grew overly cozy. But Mr. Murdoch’s own apologies are about the length to which any press baron should have to go in making amends. On a net basis the world is much better off with an unbridled press than with one regulated by potentates, parliaments, or politburos.

To see a paper like the New York Times, which thinks nothing of rebuffing a presidential plea in respect of national intelligence secrets in time of war, get on its high horse about the kind of journalism Murdoch and others practiced in London, let us just say it reeks of hypocrisy. To see the Guardian and the Times, which entered a condominium with Wikileaks, lecturing Mr. Murdoch on journalist ethics, let us just say it fails to compute. The plain fact of it is that we pity the poor British. In America we have a Constitution that not only contains a First Amendment protecting the freedom of the press from a parliament that passes on who is fit to own a newspaper. It also outlaws bills of attainder, that is legislative action attacking individuals, which is the spectacle that has been unfolding in the mother of parliaments.