Probity is Britain's new watchword. After filleting the bankers over their salaries and bonuses and excoriating MPs for fiddling their expenses we've now turned our attention to the antics of journalists.

The News of the World (NOTW) has frequently embarrassed politicians, vicars, footballers and celebrities, but the Sunday red-top is currently itself the target of an expose by a broadsheet.

According to a report in The Guardian, reporters at the "News of the Screws" worked with private investigators to access "two or three thousand" private mobile phones belonging to celebrities, MPs and public figures.

Those private investigators apparently intercepted voicemail messages and gained access to personal data such as itemised phone bills and bank statements.

But  police have said they have no plans to reopen a 2005 investigation that led to the jailing of two men, News of the World reporter Clive Goodman and a private investigator, for hacking into the phones of staff working for the royal family.

That raises the question as to whether that decision should be taken by an independent body rather than a policeman choosing not to rake over the coals of a fellow copper's report.

While the police ponder, the Press Complaints Commission has once again proved to a be a less than an effective regulator.

Rupert Murdoch has "nothing to say at all" on the story, while former NOTW editor Andy Coulson, who is now the Conservative Party communications chief apparently knew nothing. Funny how journalists and ex-journalists get all tongue-tied when they are being asked to give answers rather than the other way round.

The Daily Telegraph has been criticised for paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for buying information that allowed it to gain access to MPs' expenses claims, but at least the right-wing broadsheet could claim a public interest defence.

Not so the alleged NOTW fishing operation of celebrity tittle-tattle, which tells us much about the agenda of many of our national newspapers.

A committee of MPs is due to re-examine the phone-hacking scandal, but maybe Britain's newspaper reading public could take the matter into their own hands. On Merseyside, 20 years after the Hillsborough stadium disaster, nobody buys the Sun newspaper over the way the tabloid covered the death of 96 football fans.

That's probably an idiot's utopian idea, so in the meantime how should Britain regulate its press? And under what circumstances is electronic surveillance permissable?

- John Kampfner is chief executive of Index on Censorship and former editor of the New Statesman. His new book, “Freedom for Sale”, will be published by Simon and Schuster in September. The opinions expressed are his own. -

The news could not have come at a worse time for free speech campaigners. Revelations that private detectives have been paid large sums by the tabloid press to hack into the mobile phones and other records of public figures will cause damage to the newspaper at the heart of the practice, the “News of the World”.

It will not enhance the credibility of its former Editor, Andy Coulson, now David Cameron’s trusted Director of Communications at the Conservative Party.

But the consequences are far more important than the future of a tabloid and a spin doctor. The scandal – for it is a scandal – has unleashed a further bout of yelping from the “something must be done” brigade, the people in public life who argue that the media has long been “out of control”.

Their cheerleader is Tony Blair, who famously used one of his last days as prime minister to take revenge on journalists, deriding them as “feral beasts”.

The painful truth is that, in one respect, these people are not wrong. British journalism contains no shortage of sleazy practice. And yet the context is entirely misleading. The biggest problem with the Fourth Estate is not that it finds out too much, but that it finds out too little. Investigative journalism is a declining art.

Much of that is due to economics. It costs a considerable amount to deploy a team to eke out information about, say, a dodgy arms deal, unethical corporate practice, or British collusion in torture. Sometimes months of probing leads to nothing, and editors are under pressure to account for every penny they spend. Some of the decline is attributed to simply laziness. It takes a lot of effort to commission and see through difficult stories.

But the main impediment comes from Britain’s horrific libel laws. So skewed is the legislation and the practice that the burden of proof in court falls entirely on the media, rather than the plaintiff. The costs have grown beyond all proportion and are entirely out of sync with the original “offence”. This has led to malicious threats of prosecutions by the rich and famous, forcing newspapers to retract, even where they know the information to be correct, simply because they cannot afford to sustain their defence.

Britain has now become the libel capital of the world, the home of what has come to be known as “libel tourism”, the destination of choice for Russian oligarchs and others to prosecute not just journalists, but book authors, even NGOs. The chilling effect is hard to quantify, because beyond the prosecutions and threats lies the self censorship that is affecting so much journalism at the moment. The new mantra, from the BBC to most newspapers, even now to some bloggers, is: “why cause trouble?”

The House of Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport is putting the finishing to an enquiry it has been carrying out on “press standards, privacy and libel”—note the order. At Index on Censorship, in conjunction with English PEN, we have been conducting our own inquiry into the impact of libel. We have spoken to editors, lawyers, journalists, publishers, bloggers and NGO in a unified campaign for changes in the libel law.

We intend to issue our report in coming months as the government ponders its response to the Select Committee. We urge those preparing their conclusions to distinguish between robust investigative journalism that seeks to find out what the powerful would rather conceal from us and grubby and often illegal practice.

If they fail to make this distinction, if they tarnish us with the same brush, democracy and free expression will be the losers.

Have Your Say: Tabloid trickery versus the right to know

-Nicholas Jones is the author of Trading Information: Leaks, Lies and Tip-offs (Politico’s, 2006). He is a member of the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. The opinions expressed are his own.-

When searching for news and checking facts reporters often have to bend the rules and possibly break the law. But through its purchase of confidential mobile phone messages the “News of the World” has blackened the reputation of British journalism.

In a true democracy journalists have to be free to investigate without the constant fear of falling foul of the state or of being hounded by the police and the courts. Indeed principled journalists are ready to go to jail rather than reveal their sources.

But there is a huge difference between a justified breach of personal privacy in support of investigative journalism and a blatant fishing trip for private and confidential information.

From what is already known about the hacking into mobile phone messages of Prince William and others – for which a “News of the World” editor was sent to jail — it is clear that this was a calculated, commercially driven operation that was not only in breach of the law but an affront to established journalistic standards.

So great is the competition for exclusive stories that increasingly British newspapers and magazines have had fewer and fewer scruples when it comes to purchasing confidential information, whether it was leaked, stolen or gained through unauthorised access.

For example, every week the “Sun” and the “News of the World” offer their readers cash in return for exclusive stories and pictures. When there is money on offer, the temptation can be too great.

There are numerous cases where some of those who were responsible for safeguarding confidential information and data have abused their position. Police officers, tax inspectors, bank staff and a host of other workers who gave access to personal and private data have been accused of passing on information to journalists.

Advances in technology have facilitated this trade and the opportunities multiply: incriminating footage on CCTV tapes find a ready market and so do pictures of notorious prisoners taken on mobile phones.

British newspapers are in the dock because the purchase of information is now so commonplace. But whatever the reservations of some journalists, the Daily Telegraph has demonstrated – with its disclosures about the abuse of MPs’ expenses – that even when confidential information has been purloined and then sold, there is a public interest defence.

What added justification to the purchase by the “Daily Telegraph” of the misappropriated disc from the House of Commons fees office was that MPs had changed the law on Freedom of Information in order to prevent the data from being published.

No such extenuating circumstances apply to the “News of the World”: by encouraging and condoning hacking into mobile phone messages and then by acquiescing at the sale of that information to the highest bidder, the “News of the World” shamed the good name of investigative journalism.

Have Your Say: Tabloid trickery versus the right to know