Leading article: Of hacks and hacking

The News of the World's former royal reporter Clive Goodman and its former editor Andy Coulson have managed to bring newspaper journalism even further into disrepute. What did they think they were doing? They presumably imagined that they would never get caught. Yet the risks they took made no sense. Mr Goodman paid a denizen of the dark underbelly of journalism's dark underbelly to help intercept the voice messages of royal staff. He is now paying the personal price of a four-month jail sentence.

If he did not know about it, Mr Coulson should have done, a fact he accepted by resigning on Friday. And Mr Murdoch has been royally embarrassed by his failure to send a clear message through the News Corporation system that such practices - whose existence can't have come as a surprise to him - will not be tolerated.

This newspaper can afford to take a high moral tone, not least because we are not in the business of paying £105,000 a year to the likes of Glenn Mulcaire for his illegal services. But this illegal and unacceptable intrusion into privacy is not confined to the News of the World. The Independent newspapers do not intercept private calls and never would, but other press groups do. The cause of press self-regulation has suffered another humiliating setback, and it requires more vigorous action from the Press Complaints Commission than we have hitherto seen on this issue to recover the lost ground.