Inconceivable!

Say what you like about the tabloid press, but they know what people want and by golly, they give it to them. That's what you snobs don't understand.

Remember that argument? You used to hear it a lot back when people would try to convince you the tabloids weren't full of a bunch of lying, baying jackals and crooks who treated their audience with barely disgused contempt. Good times.

What's the point?

Slim pickings around these parts recently, for which I apologise.

A few things contributing, but one of the main ones is the demoralising spectacle of the News of the World phone hacking scandal diminishing back into obscurity, looking less and less likely to actually go anywhere as time goes by. The ludicrousness of trusting the police to investigate a case in which they themselves have been accused of previously pursuing without due vigour has been exposed with witnesses threatened with being treated like suspects, thus successfully discouraging anyone from coming forward. Job done. 

What would the Met get in return for not looking hard at News of the World phone hacking?

You might not have noticed because most of the British press seems curiously reluctant to cover it, but earlier in the week, the New York Times produced some new evidence that the Conservative party's chief spin doctor Andy Coulson knew much more about the phone hacking scandal of 2006 than he was letting on. Maybe they were too busy covering allegations regarding William Hague's sexuality, and his emotional revelations about not being gay that came out at the same time, handily and totally coincidentally for the Conservatives' spin doctor. Ahem.

Columnists: Creators of imaginary worlds

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound incertainties - that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.

Salmain Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands

Tabloid newspapers don't exist to report the news to an uninformed pulic. They exist to sell an audience to their advertisers, which they manage by packaging up a product to appeal to that target audience. This product might achieve the illusion of being news, in that it often concerns itself with current events, but it isn't really - at least not in the way that most of us think of the news. Most people think of 'reporting the news' as telling the public what is happening around them as accurately as possible. Sure, we might expect a bit of comment or a bit of spin on what gets reported, but that's not what we get from the tabloids.

Andy Coulson lives with the PCC and the Met

Living with homosexual parents is so damaging - I wonder if she grew up to be a phone tapping tabloid hack as a result
It's weird. You go away for a while and mean to come back to write about things other than the tabloids and find out two things that scupper your plans. The first is that the break has taken care of some of the weariness you felt at looking at the same old hateful bilge every day, and the other is that an unusual confluence of events has exposed just how ineffective press self regulation is, and how rotten the whole business can be.