Even though the papers had a story on a plate, even though the managers of Barts were committed to open government, not one reporter came to the trust's public meetings. Their desperate employers had fired most of them and ordered the survivors to stay at their desks and recycle press releases. More to the point, there were no "citizen journalists", live Tweeters or bloggers at Barts either. For here is what no one, not even Steve Jobs or Bill Gates understood: the web would indeed set people free. It would empower the masses and tear down hierarchies. But once the web had destroyed the old funding model for journalism, no one would take the place of the  reporters who trudged along to crime scenes, meetings and court cases. It turned out that unless a news organisation trained people to do it, paid them to do it and ordered them to do it, no one would want to do a difficult and at times boring job for nothing.

Big court cases and crimes are still covered, as is parliament. But the pronouncements of local politicians and the lofty declarations of judges are being heard less and less. Intelligent lawyers are asking themselves where the deterrent power of sentences lies when so few know what punishments judges are dispensing. In television drama series, directors show reporters mobbing the detective in Broadchurch or following every move of Copenhagen's municipal politicians in The Killing. In the real world, reporters are vanishing and, for all their faults, you will miss them.

To its credit, the government has promised to create 50 local television channels to cover towns and cities where newspapers once flourished. The handful now broadcasting show the well-meant policy must fail. London Live, which had the most going for it, has atrocious ratings for the obvious reason that it cannot afford to hire the reporters to cover the politics, crimes, arts and scandals of one of the world's great cities. Like local newspapers, local television cannot attract enough advertising in the age of the internet.

A few years ago, Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, said something that has haunted me: "For the first time since the Enlightenment, it's possible to imagine societies — towns, cities, and even countries — without any agreed or verifiable forms of the truth."

If that is too apocalyptic for your taste, consider the difference between a private and a public institution. Journalists have no right to cover the board meetings of J.P. Morgan and Barclays, although the world might be a better place if they did. But they can cover the court cases and board meetings of the public institutions of a democracy. Now, because of changes in technology, public institutions are becoming private affairs. It is no one's fault. The wicked state is not removing access. It is just that no competent replacement for the old trade of journalism exists.

It is for this reason, I believe, that for all the bellowing of Lord Justice Leveson and for all the complaints about the decline of deference, the powerful of the 21st century will have an easier time of it than their predecessors in the 20th.