Chris

Does it, though? Are we not in danger of confusing News International, a large multinational corporation, with those bits of it that got out of control and began engaging in legally dubious activities such as phone hacking?

I think there's more than a little score-settling going on here now. The BBC has every reason to put the boot in to NI (and Boris, after all, his politics aren't exactly the sort BBC news editors generally like to promote). In the absence of documents showing that Boris tried to link sponsorship with influence over the police investigation, I see no obvious conflict of interest here.