Just the one question: why?

We probably shouldn't consign the Vanessa Perroncel business to history without asking that one question. Why?

The glib answer ('oh, come on, everyone knows news is just a commodity these days') is, as you'd expect, the easiest. The argument that character assassination composed of untruths, innuendo and pure bile makes more money for the Mail on Sunday and the News of the World than any apology or settlement loses them. Or at least it's a risk worth taking.

So does that commercial argument alone justify what Ms Perroncel herself described on Today as "a nightmare" in which "everything was false"?

Where journalists simply wouldn't believe the truth ... because it didn't fit their and their editors' views of the world? Where denials or evidence that contradicted their stories was just discounted? Where people of no public interest whatsoever - characters marginal to the 'story' whose only misdemeanour was to be related to Ms Perroncel - had their names and reputations trashed 'in the public interest'?

No, there's something more pernicious going on here. This was how the Guardian's Nick Davies described it in an earlier interview with Ms Perroncel:

"(She) committed one of the worst sins in Fleet Street: she refused to talk to the press. So fantasy took over.

She became a fictional object on whom journalists projected classic stereotypes: the beautiful woman who was "gagging for it", as the News of the World put it; "shameless", a "maneater", a "football groupie" in the words of the other papers; the "gold digger" who was "money hungry", seducing men for their wallets.

As Perroncel says: "They made out that I'm some kind of prostitute. That's really what they're saying. And the stories are untrue. They have gone mad."

And then she asks the question which is so obvious and so easily forgotten: "Who are they to do this?"

Who indeed?

By not talking to the tabloids, Ms Perroncel had guaranteed the blind retaliation of the scorned.

We often talk in a misty eyed, semi-romantic way about the 'press-pack'; admire the sharp practice that 'gets the story'; or just shake our heads and mutter 'free speech and all that'.

But, as we find time and again, real things happen to real people because journalists haven't done their job properly. Had no interest in doing their job properly; no intention of delivering the thing journalism promises: truthful revelation in the public interest.

And they've failed, not because the story is complex and the truth well hidden but because their victims haven't played their game and the self-regarding urge for revenge occludes all else.

And because of a journalistic mindset which prefers being spectacularly wrong about the sensational to being (boringly) accurate about ... well, about anything. Ask the McCanns.

Is it enough, though, to know that the Vanessa Perroncel stories happened; and that they were wrong and vindictive; and that there've been grudgingly worded apologies?

Don't we also need to know why?

A job, you'd have thought, for the Press Complaints Commission - except that its 'rules' don't allow such intrusion into newspapers' private affairs.

Or, as Ms Perroncel more accurately puts it:

"There are too many newspaper editors who sit on it ... From these same papers. It's a conflict of interest.

Who would trust them?"

Who indeed.