As Lord Justice Leveson said on the first day of his inquiry into press practices, his task was to determine "who guards the guardians".
After 25 weeks of testimony and many thousands of pages of written submissions, it is necessary to come back to that fundamental question.
The Leveson Inquiry was not aimed at the decent journalists who make up the bulk of the profession: men and women who use their wits, contacts, skills and sweat to fill the columns of our newspapers each day. It was born out of public revulsion over phone-hacking at the disgraced News of the World.
It had become clear that what had happened there was more than the work of "a few bad apples", though how far the rot had spread is yet to be decided in court, after charges were laid yesterday against seven former staff members, including Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson. What is apparent from three Scotland Yard operations is that criminal behaviour was not restricted to News International publications or to phone-hacking.
A vicious circulation war between London-based titles and the development of a whole new set of dark arts, associated with new technology, formed the backdrop to a process where a section of the press appeared to have lost its moral compass. The process was facilitated by unhealthily chummy relations between some newspaper executives and some senior police officers and politicians. Those working on regional and Scottish titles, including The Herald, and who have been innocent bystanders in this process, have watched in dismay as the Leveson Inquiry has besmirched the profession.
In the process some important distinctions have been blurred. One is the difference between genuine victims of monstrous intrusion into their private grief and media stars who actively court the press until its intimations displease them. Second, there has been much loose talk about "public interest", as if every newspaper story requires such a justification. It does not. There is always a balance to be struck between the right to privacy and the right to know but it would be a mistake to overly proscribe this area. Newspapers have the right to print stories that are trivial and entertaining and the public has a right to read them. Public interest only becomes an issue when a journalist is "sailing close to the wind" legally.
The voluntary principle has worked well for regional titles, whose wrongs are generally the result of slip-ups rather than mischief. However, we recognise that the system has lost the public's trust, following the failure of the Press Complaints Commission to act on hacking. The Herald reluctantly accepts the need to formalise and codify press regulation, as well as to give the new body the power both to investigate wrong-doing and impose sanctions. Nevertheless, in preparing his report, we would remind Lord Leveson of another observation he made in his opening remarks: that freedom of expression and freedom of the press are fundamental to democracy.
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