Have a Good NEWS

In a world where we all have to justify ourselves, newspapers should do so too. Likewise the police, difficult though their job is

During the interview with the persecuted Tory press last week, I said: "I think William Hague - I do not t 'believe Andy Coulson."

Is that verdict based on any information that's not freely available to everyone? No, it's just my judgment as to where the balance of probability lies, reinforced by decades spent as a journalist.

Listening to Yates of the Yard struggling over the News of the World phone-hacking story against an under-briefed Justin Webb on Radio 4's Today programme â€" here's Andy Sparrow's take on it- Nothing to change my mind. This problem won 't go away. Read Nick Davies today 's Guardian â€" or yesterday's Observer feature to catch up.

In both cases, those defending Hague and Coulson, an ex-editor of the News of the World and now David Cameron's Alastair Campbell, accuse their critics of being politically motivated (driven by commercial rivalry with the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal in the case of the New York Times's investigation into the phone-hacking operations at the NoW).

The Tory blogger Iain Dale, who is a wholesome chap, got excited about it here the other day: "Coulson's Accusers Can Go to Hell".

Low calculations are part of the story â€" they usually are. And why not? Commercial motives drive much of what the media does. We are none of us in business to lose money, though we often do.

Ten years ago, pre-Murdoch WSJ ran cracking one page profile of Murdoch 's third wife, Wendy Deng - basically, it accused her of being manipulative golden shovel - which is currently in paywall, if at all. Here 's Slate s' take on this , and here's Gawker's.

It can be argued that this piece was also politically or commercially motivated by fear of an opponent who even had his eye on the WSJ. But it was also a fascinating story about two important people, a kind of reporting, which has the protection of public interests. I thought it was a touch too intrusive, but read every word.

Public interest defence is the crucial bit. As I wrote here last week, I thought Hague didn't deserve the treatment he got. Did you notice that tawdry queue of Sunday columnists denouncing him for his embarrassing personal statement, as if he'd wanted to do it?

Interestingly, of the Sunday papers I read at home, only the Murdoch Sunday Times bothered with the story. That's why I don't hesitate to mention the Deng profile again.

Most papers were busier, as they had been for much of the week, with the NoW disclosures about alleged corruption in the Pakistan cricket team, where the evidence looks strong. Marked notes were reportedly found in the hotel rooms of key players â€" notes handed to the middleman by the NoW's reporters. Well done, NoW.

But hang on: here's a problem which pulls some of the threads together. Pakistan's high commissioner in London has been robust â€" loyal but silly, says me â€" in suggesting his players may have been fitted up. Eventually, he may get round to suggesting collusion between the cops and the NoW.

After all, it's happened before and is at the heart of what the efforts by the Guardian and the New York Times to expose what really happened in the phone-tapping affair and why Scotland Yard seems to have limited the scope of its inquiry into the Clive Goodman/Glenn Mulcaire case (jailed for tapping royal phones), the subsequent review of the files and failure to warn the "vast number" (internal description) of those whose phones may have been tapped.

There may be good operational reasons for what the Met did, certainly in restricting its initial case â€" a commonplace procedure to make them manageable â€" though I did not hear it from the force's assistant commissioner, John Yates, on Radio 4 this morning.

Police officers can have private and professional relationships with journalists, but not improper, he said.

Well, if you say so, Mr. Yates. I 'M glad that everything is better than they were in their short stay in the room press Yard'. The trouble is that there is now and Sunday, people were busy at the weekend fingering love Wayne Rooney 'life again. It 's one of those tawdry kiss and tell on gold-excavator.

Clearly, we can all see the public interest defence in exposing corruption in cricket. It destroys the very essence of the game. I remain at a loss to see the public interest in what Wayne Rooney does with one of his less important organs at the weekend â€" it's his feet and brain, all that highly-attuned coordination, that we're interested in.

After the John Terry affair cost the Chelsea star his England captaincy, which can't have helped our hapless national team at the World Cup, you'd have thought they'd have learned. Rooney may have done, since the sex allegations against him relate to last year. But the tabloids never learn.

It happens that, when the Sun turned over the teenage Rooney in a four-page special on his sex life in 2004, they caused a lot of grief to the family of the "auld slapper" (actually 52) with whom he'd been dealing. It's a complicated case, which I wrote about later.

But the relevant bit, so I subsequently heard, was that the paper was able to win a libel case which the woman had brought because of information improperly provided by Merseyside police. She had made serious allegations against a copper, which should have remained confidential.

All of which is another way of saying that there are intimate links between some policemen â€" including some very senior ones â€" and newspapers, especially those that investigate crime and rascality, real or imagined. It's a murky world, and not all of it is against the public interest.

But some things will be. You may have noticed that some of the leading boilers (those more likely to be admired in the Guardian, than at present) were among those targeted for burglary, as well as the (labor?) Politicians, pro football, and various celebrities.

If you want to, you can throw in the loans-for-honours inquiry, which saw Ruth Turner, a wholesome Blair staffer â€" still on the payroll â€" arrested in a much-publicised dawn raid which (predictably) never resulted in charges, but damaged Blair and Labour.

Tori violations of fund-raising for decades have been much more impressive, as you 'd expect from people with more money and more lawyers.

So the spider's web of News International connections can easily seem a bit too cosy, especially if you want to get really paranoid and note that ex-Met chief Lord Stevens went on to write a NoW column. Andy Hayman, who headed the original inquiry into the phone-hacking affair, now writes for the Times.

"It's not about us going for Coulson, it's more about the police," one Labour figure was quoted as saying by the Observer. That claim may be stretching a point.

In a world where we all have to justify ourselves, newspapers should do so too. Likewise the police, difficult though their job is.

It just so happens that the coalition has brought parliament back early this year â€" it opens at 2.30pm with questions to the home secretary.

It is a wholesome decision it may regret in today's circumstances. This accountability stuff is hard work.