For eight months now the press have been allowed to pursue every finagling twist and turn to avoid being held to account after the horrors of the hacking scandal in the hope that memories of their illegal behaviour will gradually fade and they can then return yet again to business as usual, like the banks.
The outstanding issue is not about the details of the Leveson proposals (which have been almost universally accepted) so much as about the nature of press freedom. If press freedoms are to be preserved (and nobody dissents from that), then, it is argued, the regime must be genuinely voluntary. That immediately raises two questions. What is press freedom? And if the regime is ‘genuinely voluntary’, doesn’t that give those newspapers who have broken the law (and nearly all newspapers engaged in hacking on a big scale) a veto on anything they dislike?
