2011, the year journalism changed. But into what?

Below is an adapted extract of a chapter by Kevin Marsh from the book The Phone Hacking Scandal: Journalism at the Crossroads, to be published in February.

In 2011, journalism changed forever.

We don't know yet what it's changed into. But we know what it's going to change from.

The reasons? Leveson. The implosion of the Press Complaints Commission - a ridiculous, two-decade long experiment in the lunatics running not just the asylum but the lives of all of us who are not inmates. And the gut wrenching revelations of the truth we all kinda already knew: that the British tabloid press was nothing more than a faintly legitimised bunch of hypocritical thugs who'd mastered a business model that turns hate into money.

Leveson has become subtitled 'the phone hacking inquiry'. It's very much more than that. Phone-hacking is just one small part of something that's become very, very sick in our culture and our society.

The business model of the tabloid press had become so dependent on trashing the reputations of 'ordinary people', as well as celebrities, politicians, people in public life, that it is now nothing other than a machine to convert harassment, intrusion, misery, sneering and mockery into cash.

Anger and vindictiveness are its default settings. Papers sell on the depths of their inhumanity. Columnists are judged by the frequency and inventiveness of the offence they cause.

By the end of just one week of these accounts to the Leveson inquiry it was clear the game was up. Almost no-one was prepared to defend the way the tabloids use their immense power. And while it may still be far from clear how the world will change for them, change it will.

Few tabloid editors, even, are prepared to take the stand to defend what they do. And listening to one that did, the Daily Mail's Paul Dacre, you can understand why.

True, Dacre was prepared to break cover and deserves some credit for that. But there the credit ends. And although he was speaking to the Leveson inquiry before that long queue of 'just ordinary people' gave their accounts, he misjudged the public mood catastrophically.

Claiming what he and fellow editors did - and, presumably, how they did it - was in the public interest. Asserting his and his fellow editors' absolute and unqualified freedom of expression. Standing on their right to expose corruption and hold power to account.

This is hypocrisy of the most snivelling sort. Worse, it pollutes the arguments we need to protect the best in journalism by trying to justify the worst.

Yes, it's vital that we protect our freedom of expression. Yes, it's vital that no-one can be silenced when they call power to account or root out corruption, or ruthlessly examine and embarrass powerful institutions. Yes, it's vital that we insist power is exercised transparently and that we can hold it to account.

And it's vital that we protect the right of the press to do all of these. But the truth is that's not what the tabloids do.

The fact is, the tabloid press is now the last unaccountable power in the land.

The tabloids aren't out to defend freedom of expression. They're out only to turn their arbitrary moral hypocrisies into cash.

For every MPs' expenses exclusive - not a tabloid exclusive incidentally - there are thousands of 'ordinary people' harassed, vilified, libelled.

For every court battle that lifts injunctions to exposes evil corporations - not something the tabloids have ever indulged in - there are dozens to assert the tabloids' right to report that yet another dog has bitten yet another man. Or rather, another premiership footballer has been caught with his shorts off.

Defending the tabloids' right to do what they want to who they want how they want is nothing to do with protecting free speech. Or protecting the press.

In the long queue of 'just ordinary people' and celebrities who gave Leveson their accounts of tabloid harassment there was one that struck me especially forcefully. It was Sienna Miller's.

She told how up to 15 men would stalk her every day. How they would spit on her to get a reaction. How they would chase her, alone, down dark streets at midnight.

The men weren't just your ordinary, common-or-garden stalkers, perverts and muggers. They'd been given licence by their editors to leave decency behind and 'legitimised' by Miller's celebrity and the cameras they carried.

Miller was just 21 years old. The same age my daughter is now. That gave her account, for me, a painful resonance and piquancy.

Leveson will have got it right if his solution makes the press truly accountable to us, the public. 

If the tabloid press has to take more care than it does now that it's honest and fair and has more than a passing relationship with the truth. If it can tell the difference between challenging power and trashing the lives of the victims of crime. If we, the public, can put wrongs right quickly and fairly.

And if young women, whether a celebrity like Miller or 'just ordinary people' like the rest of us, are no longer terrorised by thuggish yobs, turning that terror into cash for the power that is the tabloid press.

Leveson has generated a cottage industry devoted to the new media ethics. One that I'm associated with, a group that grew out of the 'Hacked Off' campaign, is working on a comprehensive submission to Leveson to try to re-balance the relative power of the media and those it touches.

Kevin Marsh, a former editor of Today and executive editor of the BBC College of Journalism, is currently completing a book on New Labour, the BBC and the Hutton inquiry called Stumbling on Truth. It'll be published by Biteback in September 2012.