As Lord Leveson begins his work, Times Higher Education invited me to consider the broad significance of the phone hacking scandal. It matters, hacking is almost always utterly wrong (almost, not always) but it would be foolish to imagine it is the most serious issue facing journalism or that it deserves entirely the ferocious storm of sanctimony it has generated. The guilty people must be punished, but when that has been done we will realise that the hacking crisis has brought out of the woodwork many critics who loathed and reviled popular journalism even before Rupert Murdoch bought The Sun. They are revisiting old crusades and assorted C-list celebrities are overjoyed to help them them. Their real objectives often appear muddled but at their worst they include state-regulation of newspapers and neutering raucous popular tabloid reporting. Few of them appear to have thought about how journalism might survive without profits.