I note that News of the World has not defended its hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone. They have not come out and said that it was a legitimate practice in pursuit of an important story. I’m not sure what that story would have been. To me, it is clear that they were pursuing ever private details of a human-interest story – and that’s not News.

“This should have been one of the great stories of all time. It has almost everything — royalty, police corruption, Downing Street complicity, celebrities by the cartload, Fleet Street at its most evil and disgusting. One day, I guess, it will be turned into a brilliant film, and there will be a compulsive book as well.

The truth is that very few newspapers can declare themselves entirely innocent of buying illegal information from private detectives. A 2006 report by the Information Commissioner gave a snapshot into the affairs of one such ‘detective’, caught in so-called ‘Operation Motorman’. The commissioner’s report found that 305 journalists had been identified ‘as customers driving the illegal trade in confidential personal information’. It named each newspaper group, the number of offences and the number of guilty journalists (see above). But, as the commission observed, coverage of this scandal ‘even in the broadsheets, at the time of publication, was limited’. The same reticence has been seen, until now, over the voicemail-hacking scandal.

By minimising these stories, media groups are coming dangerously close to making a very significant statement: they are essentially part of the same bent system as News International and complicit in its criminality. At heart this is a story about the failure of the British system, which relies on a series of checks and balances to prevent high-level corruption. Each one of them has failed: parliament because MPs feel intimidated by the power of newspapers to expose and destroy them; and opposition, because Ed Miliband lacked the moral imagination to escape the News International mindset — until he was forced to confront it all by the sheer horror of the Milly Dowler episode.

That leaves the prime minister. He finally woke up to the kind of company he has been keeping on Tuesday when during his Afghanistan visit he declared the Milly Dowler revelations ‘truly dreadful’. David Cameron has repeatedly displayed an inability to make a distinction between right and wrong. The press ought to have stepped into the breach. Unfortunately, we in Fleet Street have forgotten that the ultimate vindication of journalism is not to intrude into, and destroy, private lives. Nor is it the dance around power, money and social status. It is the fight for truth and decency.” – PETER OBORNE

I think that the newspapers should have the right to carry out many of the practices that have been condemned. I just wish that there was nobody within the industry except a lunatic fringe that wanted to exercise that right in pursuit not of hard news stories, but of gossip and human interest.

A publication that thinks that news of the the birth of the Beckhams’ daughter is the most important story in the world today is not a newspaper and should not be treated as such. Such publications should be given a different name and treated as being a different category of thing from those newspapers that actually publish, you know, news. That’s what it comes down to – so-called newspapers that are actually just gossip sheets.