The never-ending fallout from the phone-hacking case means we overlook behaviour on both sides that needs to be challenged
The trouble with so much phone-hacking murk is that ordinary standards of press-freedom behaviour get lost in the dirty washing. Take the Guardian report last week that, early in 2004, a Home Office warrant allowed Scotland Yard to bug the phone of Rebekah Brooks as part of an anti-corruption investigation of the News of the World.
But that's not quite the point.
In 2004, Ms Brooks was editor of the Sun, not the News of the World: so maybe it was a crossed line anyway.
And why should we be so damned insouciant about tapping newspaper editors' phones? This is Wapping, not Belarus.
(Oh! And it might be a touch better on the freedom front if newspaper legal teams, led by the Sun, weren't quite so anxious about turning the anonymity of a "world famous actor, father and loving husband" who slept with the 23-year-old who once slept with Wayne Rooney into some kind of holy crusade for glasnost. All this repression may be a bit galling, chaps: but please try to find a better example.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/apr/17/phone-tapping-news-of-the-world