If British tabloid journalism has been one of the guilty pleasures of our culture, after a week that led to the closure of the News of the World,there seems more guilt and less pleasure in it.
Until now, Britons have been perversely proud of the rapacity of their popular newspapers while laughing hypocritically at US excesses in papers such as the National Enquirer.
But now British readers have been forced to take an interest in what goes on behind the scenes, like diners disgusted by footage from the slaughterhouse.
There's been indignation inflation all week. As Simon Hoggart recorded in his Guardian parliamentary sketch on Thursday:
"Prime minister's questions, and the special debate held later in the day, was like a conference on section 867 of Roget's Thesaurus. Here is just a selection of the words MPs used about the hacking: 'absolutely disgusting', 'revolting' (and that was just David Cameron), 'appalling', 'immoral', 'scandalous', 'dreadful', 'against common decency and shared humanity', 'unspeakable', 'sordid', 'outrageous', 'beyond the pale', 'criminal', 'loathsome', 'shameful, sickening and cruel'."
The Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission was anxious to demonstrate that she was of the same mind when she spoke to John Humphrys on Today:
Baroness Buscombe: "I hope you can hear my fury..."
Humphrys: "Well, I can, but..."
As to what all this will mean when the dust settles, Peter Oborne in the Telegraph reaches out to a rival paper in a devastating attack on David Cameron which begins:
"In the careers of all prime ministers there comes a turning point. He or she makes a fatal mistake from which there is no ultimate recovery."
Oborne's analysis restates Ed Miliband's criticism: that Cameron had fallen in with a bad crowd, known as the Chipping Norton set. And he had been warned:
"Alan Rusbridger - Editor of the Guardian newspaper, which has performed such a wonderful service to public decency by bringing to light the shattering depravity of Mr Murdoch's newspaper empire - went to meet one of Mr Cameron's closest advisers shortly before the last election. He briefed this adviser very carefully about Mr Coulson, telling him many troubling pieces of information that could not then be put into the public domain.
Mr Rusbridger then went to see Nick Clegg, now the Deputy Prime Minister. So Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg - the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister - knew all about Mr Coulson before last May's coalition negotiations. And yet they both paid no attention and went on to make him the Downing Street director of communications, an indiscretion that beggars belief."
780 Telegraph readers had commented on Oborne's piece at the time of writing, not all in agreement with his pat on the back for the Guardian. Ooopiop writes:
"Can Alan Rusbridger and the 'Guardian' please explain how their moral outrage at the phone hacking scandal squares with their wholehearted support of Wikileaks illegal publishing of private hacked official correspondence?"
In the midst of all the carnage, there were signs of the emergence of a new media landscape.
Its cheerleader, Arianna Huffington, was one of the few people this week with a good word to say about the British press. As part of the launch of a British version of her successful Huffington Post online news site, she wrote a blog entitled: "Why We're Excited To Be Joining Your Thriving, Innovative Media Culture." (Our own Marc Settle, in his review of the first British edition, commented on Those Capitals.)
The financial success of the Huffington Post has been because it's partly a news aggregator, linking to other media organisations' content, and partly because many of its own contributors work unpaid.
That's not good for journalists, of course. But then journalism is not necessarily well served either, as we've seen, by the handing out of large amounts of money from well-funded newsrooms like those of News Corp.
Will the effects of this week's phone-hacking revelations be confined to the popular papers? Not necessarily: Wednesday's PM on Radio 4 featured a message from a listener who said she was cancelling her subscription to the Times, and the commentator Steve Hewlett remarked that the public was beginning to talk about the 'Murdoch empire' - a concept which until now had been mainly confined to media types.
But could there be still wider ripples? "News too often puts the truth under siege," was the headline of a piece in the Times on Tuesday by the former BBC reporter Martin Bell. It was about tricks used by television war correspondents to spice up their reports:
"The most common dishonesty lies in fiddling soundtracks. A reporter in a quiet corner of the battlefield may be tempted to incorporate sounds of gunfire from elsewhere. I have a friend, a brave and gifted engineer, who was operating the satellite feed from a war zone and knew that what he was transmitting, for an established TV news reporter, was fundamentally false. He remonstrated with the man, who told him that he was an 'oily rag' - reporter-speak for a mere technician - and it was none of his business.
Another sleight of hand is visual. The reporter will be pictured at some safe distance from the action rushing across the street as if under gunfire. The sequence is then spliced into real combat footage from the sharp end. Well edited, it looks totally convincing.
Then there is the practice of passing off reconstructions as the real thing..."
Could the practices of television news be next in the spotlight?
Along with the Huffington Post, there were other signs of an emerging media future this week, some more convincing than others.
Facebook launched its partnership with Skype to offer live video chat, claiming that the amount each individual user 'shares' on its site is increasing exponentially. So Facebook isn't just signing up more users (and looking forward confidently to its billionth) but, as more apps such as video chat become available and there are more people on the network, each user finds more reasons to hang around - leaving them less time to read newspapers, watch TV news, or even look at other websites.
In the 'jury's still out' category, two other new initiatives:
Iain Dale's online project, Dale and Company, hasn't (as of writing) launched, despite promising noises, such as this tweet on Monday:
"We're hoping to launch the new @daleandcompany site later tomorrow. It will be located at iandale.com. You're the first to know :)"
By Wednesday there was this:
"Final tweaks being made to @daleandco. Depending on progress, site will go live midnight tonight or midnight Thursday. #worththewait."
The site itself is now predicting the launch for midnight on Friday.
Finally, a launch of a high-minded publication, the European Daily (below), which in its editor's blog describes itself as "...the first daily newspaper to present all European news as domestic".
Is that the kind of news we will want to read? Or just the kind we're saying we want to read this week?
