by Jonathan Greengrass

Created on: July 21, 2011   Last Updated: July 25, 2011

It may have come as no surprise to many, but Rebekah Brooks finally left her job as CEO of News International on July 15th, after mounting public anger became too much for her. A woman considered a daughter by News Corp supremo Rupert Murdoch, she had been with the company since 1989 when she joined as a secretary and had risen up the corporate ranks with a mixture of what colleagues called "talent and ruthlessness". However, does this resignation come a little too late in the day for both the public as a whole and News Corp?

The calls for her resignation settled around the fact that she had been editor of the disgraced paper the News of the World at the time where alleged phone hacking was taking place, in particular the hacking of the phone of murdered schoolgirl Millie Dowler. The public outcry has been rising against her over the past weeks as more and more revelations occurred and more and more people involved either resigned or were arrested.

It reached peak volume when Rupert Murdoch, in conjunction with his son and Brooks, decided to close the News of the World after 168 years. It must have seemed greatly ironic to the employees of the News of the World to have Rebekah Brooks announce to them that they would be losing their jobs. Most of the paper's workforce had not been with the company at the time of the scandal, whilst Brooks who had been editor at the time, was keeping her job.

The question has now turned to why Brooks did not resign sooner. It is known that she had offered her resignation once already in the weeks before she eventually left, but Rupert Murdoch refused to accept it. However, many believe she should have put her case to leave more forcefully. There were many reasons for her to resign. She was editor at the News of the World whilst some serious criminal activities were being undertaken by her journalists and investigators. It may be true that she knew nothing about it, but that matters very little when considering the security of her job.

 Even if she didn't know, she would be guilty of gross negligence for not knowing what was going on in her paper. Many other former editors have weighed in on this story stating that if it had been them, even if they did not know about it, they would not have expected to keep their jobs. On the other end of the scale, she may have known and either chosen not to do anything or actively encouraged the practice of phone hacking. Either way, as soon as the news broke that such activities were occurring,

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