PCC editors failed to sound the phone-hacking alarm

worried at lack of information. Photograph: Richard Aylmer-Hall/PA

So a shameful rash of phone-hacking (up till 2006, after which there's only been an odd unproven spot or two) prompts calls for more legal controls on the press. So the Press Complaints Commission launches its own inquiry, led by a former chief constable and a professor of law. So the big question for the PCC is: what went wrong?

Answer: in a way, not very much. The commission isn't an investigatory body. When the police and the information commissioner blew the whistle on newspapers' illicit blagging for bank accounts and so on before all this, there had been no complaints.

The PCC issued stern, uncoded warnings, and the crookedness more or less stopped. One reporter from the News of the World went to prison for hacking