The lack of ethics of a tabloid on the other side of the planet may now have serious implications for our newspapers, especially those in Australia.

In an era of more spin doctors than real doctors, I have long believed press freedom to be an essential if unappreciated cause worth fighting for at every moment, knowing my neighbour will only value independent journalism when it is dead, never to be resurrected.

Essential to democracy, be damned.

We think that. Too few can be bothered to agree.

The risk has always been that someone, somewhere would do something so monumentally stupid that the spectre of regulation would surface among our political classes.

Such idiocy has surfaced in a newsroom in Wapping, a grimy part of east London that may seem distant but is, for Australian journalists at least, now too close for comfort.

British prime minister David Cameron has already signalled the need to end self-regulation.

In Australia, politicians such as Bob Brown of the Greens, and the independent Rob Oakeshott want an inquiry.

It’s hard to argue something is not necessary in Britain, amid revelations of such professional recklessness.

But in this part of the world, we need to fight like hell.

There is no evidence or cause to believe that such level of wrongdoing exists among our colleagues.

Just as not all British politicians fudge their expenses, not all journalists are phone-hackers and haters.

Two deep currents course through the veins of journalism – truth and justice: the desire for it, and the belief in its power. If you cannot bring this into the newsroom every day, then frankly you should just sod off.

Having worked on The Sun, and occasionally the News of the World, it is not incomprehensible to understand how some individuals lost their way so monumentally.

The Sun was the most bizarrely aggressive, competitive newsroom I ever walked into.

Hanging off the ceiling was a poster that spelled out the culture: “News is something that makes you go WOW!”

Underneath it, at least when I was there, was the legendary Kelvin MacKenzie, going around to reporters’ desks with his pretend egg-whisk, urging us to beat up a story.

These were kinder days . . . when a photographer would park Princess Di’s Mini Metro because she couldn’t, not hack her phone.

But around that time, it was the Daily Mirror that pushed it too far. It put a hidden camera in a gym that Di would visit, in the hope of capturing a flirtatious shot of her with her friend, then-England rugby captain Will Carling. All hell broke loose over that stunt.

Now, Fleet Street has stepped so far over the line that perhaps there is no coming back, at least in Britain.

The fight for a free press is as old as journalism itself.

A.M. Rosenthal, executive editor of the New York Times from 1977-86, made a speech at Colby College in Maine 30 years ago.

He outlined the threats to a free press “from within”, meaning government.

Enemies outside America, he said, “we can handle”.

And while we all recoil at the disgrace that News of the World has brought on us all, A.M. Rosenthal’s words should not be forgotten, should our own politicians think they smell blood and start to circle. Rosenthal finished his speech with five telling questions:

“Do you want a society in which newspapers have to operate under the fear of being fined to death?

“Do you want a society in which newspaper offices can be searched with advance hearings? (They can in Australia).

“Do you want a society in which the public does not know what is taking place in vital parts of the court process? (Court injunctions are endemic in Australia right now).

“Do you want a society in which the police process is made virtually secret?

“Do you want a society that is the totality of all these things?”

And he added: “If the answer is ‘no, I don’t want that kind of society’, then fight like hell every inch of the way.”

It may be too late for the Brits. It is not for us.

Mark Hollands
CEO, Newspaper Publishers’ Association