Skewered by a tabloid culture she nurtured

Brooks is now that figure, with a couple more stereotypes thrown in: the ambitious woman, the homewrecker. The rise-and-fall stories are all the more breathless because she’s photogenic and melodramatic, “the sharp-eyed girl with tumbling, Rapunzel red hair,’’ in the heaving prose of the Daily Mail.

Competitors are sneering at how much her rise depended on her schmoozing skills, her cozy friendships with people she covered, a relationship with her boss that was so tight - according to the Mail - that his wife wouldn’t show up at parties she attended. It’s all very convenient, a little too much: She’s punished for being especially good at a game she didn’t create.

That game is a British tabloid culture so robust, so aggressive, that it makes American paparazzi look like shrinking wallflowers. The British public is accustomed to salacious news, and has seldom peeped, before now, about the newsgathering ethics involved, said Edward Wasserman, a professor of media ethics at Washington and Lee University.

“The stuff was a mainstay,’’ said Wasserman, who studied at the London School of Economics. “The kind of reporting we’re talking about was not aberrant. This had been going on for years.’’

In part, Wasserman said, that has to do with the role class plays in England. The upper-class papers - The Guardian, The Independent, Murdoch’s The Times of London - have higher ethical standards, but relatively tiny circulations. The tabloids are far more popular and populist, brimming with the anger of the lower classes, willing to accept any number of means to bring the powerful down.