Maybe so, but look at where the tabloids' contempt for serious journalism has led them. When people say phone hacking and bribing police officers are "illegal", they are right in law but not always right in practice. 

The Anglo-Saxon legal system allows juries rather than judges to determine guilt. If you have exposed a genuine scandal, you can always turn to the jury and say words to the effect of, "I know what I did was technically illegal, and if you were judges you would have to find me guilty. But you are members of a British jury and can follow your consciences. I ask you to recognise that I only broke the law to expose an abuse of power — and acquit me." The odds are the jury will. Official Secrets Act trials are so rare because the government knows that if leakers of classified documents can say that they acted in the public interest juries will smile at them warmly and let them walk free.

Because nothing the tabloids did would stand up in front a jury, they are defenceless in their moment of crisis. They cannot hold up one illegally obtained story, and argue that they broke the law for a good reason. I repeat, they do not have a single story to justify mass lawbreaking, not even a figleaf of a defence. The bragging editors who made a virtue of pandering to prurient readers no longer seem like cynical populists but arrant fools.

The same process is at work in television. Ever since the days of Greg Dyke, reporters and producers trying to create work of journalistic or artistic merit have heard the same tabloid sneers about the "airy-fairy" and the "elitist". The BBC no longer justifies itself by upholding the principles of public service broadcasting. Like a tabloid editor seeking to maximise sales, it reasons that it can keep the licence fee — which is in effect a tax on every home in the country — only if it gives the public what it wants to see rather than what it needs to know.

BBC3 shows how far the corporation has run from its old morality. The channel makes no pretence to educate, inform or improve its viewers, but caters for peeping Toms, who can barely read a sentence without their lips going numb.