Mal Fletcher comments

There are lines of ethical propriety and general humanity that shouldn't be crossed when gathering news on celebrities. Yet people who make their living by manipulating news outlets to feed their own myth-making machine are fair game, within the law, in a way that members of the general public are not.

We will not accept the same levels of intrusion when they are applied to ordinary members of the public. What is so repugnant about the News of the World situation is not simply that ordinary people were being spied upon, but that many of those who were targeted were at their most vulnerable. Some had just recently lost loved ones to violent crime or the terrible outcomes of war.

At News of the World, some journalists and perhaps some editors blurred the line between newslite and real news. Even if no laws had been broken, they were applying their standards for reporting celebrity tittle-tattle to stories of real human tragedy, abusing the privacy of innocent victims.

Thankfully, there is still a robust culture of journalistic integrity in Britain. Many hard-working, often underpaid researchers and writers support that culture. But we, the consumers of news, are left to wonder just how widespread is this confusion between the two types of news and of the measures taken to pursue them.

A second question springs from this week's events, which is also receiving little attention.

How much will these events add to the growing public distrust of major institutions, which traditionally provided the foundations for a stable social order?

At the heart of the MPs expenses scandal was the issue of an abuse of public trust. Newspapers and other media were quick to take up the call for major reforms. Now some sections of the news media themselves are open to a similar charge.

Today, Britain is going through a house-cleaning operation the like of which it hasn't seen for perhaps a generation. It is linked to the initial shock and lingering after-effects of the recent recession.

The sharp outbreak of the financial downturn, arriving unexpectedly as it did on the back of a sustained period of growth, left public confidence reeling. In any downturn, the currency that suffers most is the currency of public confidence. Once shaken, it can take years to re-establish.

In the recession, public anger was first directed at corporate leaders, particularly in the finance and banking sectors. Multi-million pound bonuses were being paid to people who had failed to provide due care in their management of mortgage and pension funds and the like.

The same anger was directed at MPs when, at a time of austerity, it became clear that many of the people's servants had been lining their pockets. The reputation of Parliament as an institution still hasn't fully recovered in the eyes of the electorate.

Just prior to the recession, the institutional church had its moral authority called into question in the wake of devastating stories about child abuse. The Catholic Church in particular has still not quite recovered from the revelations.

Each of these institutions, church, business and Parliament, have discovered that public trust is desperately difficult to recapture once it has been compromised.

With the News of the World story, the culture and practices of police forces are under scrutiny and in separate developments the courts have been placed under the microscope.