Actions taken in 2011 by senior executives of Rupert Murdoch’s London tabloids, following revelations about industrial-scale hacking in their newsrooms, have come back to bite them.

New reporting in the British magazine Prospect, by Nick Davies, who first revealed the criminal activity in The Guardian, gives a detailed account of what he alleges was a giant cover-up, a sustained and rigorous operation to destroy evidence of wrongdoing.

One of the executives at the center of that operation, according to Davies, was Will Lewis, who took over as CEO and publisher of The Washington Post this year.

In January 2011, Davies claims, Lewis was working hand-in-hand with Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s top tabloid editor, to identify all those involved…