By Brian CathcartRecent days have been very busy ones for newspapers in the courts, as a separate blog demonstrates here. A flood of criminal court cases involving journalists and newspapers have concluded in the space of about ten days, and we have seen some landmark outcomes:– the first conviction by a jury of a Murdoch journalist for conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office arising out of corrupt payments to a public official:– the jailing of Ian Edmondson, the fourth Murdoch news editor to be convicted for phone hacking and the eighth Murdoch employee;– the guilty plea of a second Sunday Mirror journalist (Graham Johnson) for hacking.And it does not end there.Some in the industry would like to portray this as evidence of an industry under attack. Certainly Paul Dacre, the Mail’s editor, loves to present the national press as a victim, a heroic institution persecuted by would-be censors, left-wing authoritarians and shagging celebrities.In reality what we are seeing is the criminal law finally catching up with people in the industry who have abused their power and who have made victims of others. And if we are not accustomed to this spectacle, it is because for many years the big national newspaper groups were too powerful to be brought to account.It would be nice to be able to say that these verdicts will have a cleansing effect. They certainly should: the great majority of honest journalists must be grateful to see people in their ranks who have broken the law brought to book and there is a chance for the industry to turn a page and win back some public trust. Sadly, that chance is not being seized.The coverage tells the story. The spate of court outcomes has been only sparingly reported in most national papers, and then often partially (as opposed to impartially). It is clear that no lessons are being learned by proprietors and editors. Instead, powerful men who habitually claim the highest moral ground when it comes to law breaking by others now make excuses for their own lawbreakers.If there had been such a spate of criminal convictions in any other industry or walk of life – think of the police, the banks, broadcasting, social work – would the Mail, the Times, the Mirror, the Telegraph and the Sun be so discreet and so understanding? They would not.Yet in this case they make no demands for heads to roll among those at the top of the industry because those are their own heads – the heads of Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, Paul Vickers of Trinity Mirror, and so on.Nor are they calling for fundamental reform because that is precisely what they are determined to avoid. They want to get back as soon as possible to the way things were before Leveson. They want their sham ‘self-regulator’, IPSO, to protect them from scrutiny and accountability just as the Press Complaints Commission used to.So these normally unpitying papers ask us to feel sorry for those in the dock, or to question the motives or behaviour of the police and the prosecuting authorities, or – obscenely, coming from them – to believe that this is all a plot to undermine democratic freedoms. Or they just say as little as possible, make no connections between cases and hope it will all go away.One of the important fruits of the recent cases is the reminder that phone hacking was far more common than the national press has ever admitted. In the Edmondson case it was common ground between prosecution and defence that what the defendant did was done across the industry and that many people knew about it.As for the Johnson case at the Sunday Mirror, he stated among other things that he was instructed in the art of hacking by a senior journalist on the paper – who has not, so far as we know, been brought to book. And this training was offered in a company whose chief lawyer, Paul Vickers, has repeatedly assured shareholders that hacking allegations had been thoroughly investigated at his insistence and no evidence found.People sometimes ask: do journalists still break the law? The answer must be: how would we know? Most of the industry joined in one conspiracy to conceal the truth about illegal procurement of personal data and then in another to mislead us about phone hacking, and they could do it all again. Is there any sign that they have changed, that they recognise that it is really wrong and are determined to satisfy the public it could not happen again? No, there is not.Of one thing we can be sure, if reporters on a national paper are acting illegally today, they will not be exposed for doing so by the Sun, the Times, the Express or the Mail.END