One is that Myler's last job was at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, which was shut down while he was boss due to the scandal over News reporters hacking into people's voicemail for scoops. True, the phone hacking seems to have happened before Myler got there--but he seems to have been brought in by Murdoch not so much to clean up as to cover up, to judge by his acknowledged deception (Guardian, 12/15/11):

Giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry into press standards, Myler was challenged over a letter he wrote to the PCC in August 2009--a month after the Guardian first wrote that phone hacking was widespread at the News of the World (NoW).

Jay, counsel for the inquiry, told Myler his reply to the PCC was "disingenuous" given that he had seen the so-called "for Neville" email a year earlier, which revealed that hacking at the NoW went wider than a single "rogue reporter" and prompted a £700,000 payment to football boss Gordon Taylor.

Responding to Robert Jay QC, Myler said: "I had no reason not to give them a full and frank answer. For that I apologize."

But Myler's involvement in scandals hasn't all been after the fact. Before being sent to the News, he worked at Murdoch's New York Post when that paper's scabrous ethics came under scrutiny. Here's Rolling Stones' summary (8/3/11):

The newspaper was rocked by a scandal in which a star Page Six reporter allegedly attempted to shake down billionaire Ron Burkle for "protection" from the gossip sheet, telling him, "It's a little like the Mafia."

Burkle secretly recorded Page Six reporter Jared Stern offering to go easy on him in the gossip sheet in exchange for a hefty payoff. "We know how to destroy people," Stern reportedly threatened. "It's what we do." To shield himself from character assassination, Stern allegedly suggested, Burkle could make a one-time payment of $100,000, followed by monthly installments of $10,000.

News Corp. axed Stern, dismissing him as a rogue reporter and calling his behavior "highly aberrational." But according to a 2007 affidavit by a fellow Post veteran, the alleged shakedown was an integral part of the company's culture. "The spineless hypocrites in senior management at the New York Post and News Corp. have always used 'expendable' employees as scapegoats for the misdeeds of its senior executives," Post reporter Ian Spiegelman testified. Spiegelman revealed that Page Six's top editor Richard Johnson and two others had accepted cash from a restaurateur whose business had received a positive mention the day before. Johnson also allegedly accepted a $50,000 all-expenses-paid bachelor party to Mexico from Joe Francis, the founder of Girls Gone Wild, whom the Post subsequently hyped as "the next Hugh Hefner." Spiegelman further charged that Col Allan, the Post's top editor, received free lap dances at the strip club Scores in return for favorable coverage by the paper.

Myler, as the Post's managing editor, was Johnson's superior when all this going on; it was Myler who handled Burkle's complaints when the billionaire wrote to the paper to complain about the shakedown (New York Times, 4/7/06).

Tom McGeveran of Capital (7/8/11) last year wrote up some more Myler-related scandals, including his resignation as editor of the Daily Mail in 2001 after his paper's interview in a soccer-related assault case led to a mistrial,  another mistrial that stemmed from the Post' s singling out a juror in a corporate corruption prosecution, and his defense of News of the World "investigations" that involved prostitutes tape-recording  orgies and the like.

It's been suggested that part of the appeal of hiring Myler for Zuckerman is that neither of them like Rupert Murdoch. That's true of plenty of people; it's not a good enough reason to put someone in charge of your newspaper.

That sort of depends on who "you" is. Neuharth explains:

Murdoch has an uncanny knack for figuring out what a sizable segment of readers and viewers want and giving it to them. Straight or slanted.

His Fox News television network is as blatantly right-wing as Murdoch intended it to be when he started it in 1996 to counter the left-wing MSNBC.

Oh, so that's what explained the launch of Fox News Channel in October 1996--the rampant left-wing bias of MSNBC, which had been on the air for... just about three months. The channel with all the left-wing hosts--like the show that featured Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham. The channel that made a big deal of hiring Don Imus in 1998.

The channel that would go on, in those early years, to bring viewers the likes of Michael Savage, Tucker Carlson, Alan Keyes, Oliver North and Joe Scarborough. Yep, Fox was launched to counter all of that.

Or maybe Neuharth means that Murdoch is so smart that he started a right-wing cable network knowing that his competitors would try to imitate his political slant for the better part of a decade, until finally deciding that counter-programming made more sense. So that in the late 2000s, Fox would finally have a liberal foil.

If that's what he means, then Murdoch really is an evil genius.

TVNewser noticed that the show posts a web video of the chatter among the panelists during commercial breaks. On this weekend's show, they started talking about how they weren't gonna talk about Murdoch's current scandal.

You can watch the video here.  The conversation consisted mainly of right-wing panelist Cal Thomas saying, "Anyone want to bring up the subject we're not talking about, for the streamers?"

That elicited some chuckles, and Thomas said: "I'm not going to touch it."

{NOTE: Johnston's column on NewsCorp.'s tax rebate has been retracted; read his explanation of his error here):  Other things the show won't likely discuss: David Cay Johnston notes in a Reuters column that Murdoch manages to make money on his U.S. taxes:

Over the past four years Murdoch's U.S.-based News Corp. has made money on income taxes. Having earned $10.4 billion in profits, News Corp. would have been expected to pay $3.6 billion at the 35 percent corporate tax rate. Instead, it actually collected $4.8 billion in income tax refunds, all or nearly all from the U.S. government.

News Corp has a lot of FCC licenses. There's still a clause in the federal communications law that requires that you have to be of good character to have such a license, and I was reading last night just in the approval that they gave Comcast to take over NBC, there was actually some guy who challenged the character of Comcast because when they installed a cable system somewhere they had hurt his building, and didn't pay for it. And this became a big legal proceeding, action.

So here I am reasonably certain that someone, maybe someone from the political left or whoever, is going to make a big deal of whether they are fit to have their FCC licenses under the current management.

Once upon a time, Extra! raised this issue with General Electric's NBC licenses, in "Felons on the Air: Does GE's Ownership of NBC Violate the Law?" (11-12/94). GE's record at the time including defrauding the Pentagon, fraud and money laundering. All that, unfortunately, didn't disqualify them from getting valuable licenses to control a hefty share of the public airwaves.

Here's panelist Steven Brill: