The never-ending fallout from the phone-hacking case means we overlook behaviour on both sides that needs to be challenged
Last week it was reported that Scotland Yard bugged the phone of former Sun and News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks (pictured with Rupert Murdoch). Photograph: Indigo/Getty Images
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
