As copied from the Guardian:

Dacre in the dock
For the Daily Mail every day is a good day to bury good news. This cynicism poisons our public life

The enemy did not disappoint. Paul Dacre, editor of the Daily Mail, was summoned into the light of day for a rare public viewing to face the public administration committee (PAC) in the Commons yesterday. Tall and menacing, with a touch of the public school bully, his disdain for the committee was undisguised. Elected riff-raff were daring to question the right of a free press to kick who and what it liked, any time, any place. An "I-know-where-you-live-and-who-you're-sleeping-with" tone alternated with sanctimonious self-righteousness. He is the Daily Mail personified.
Here was a rare moment when the press was called to account. The Mail is unused to scrutiny: it never apologises, never explains. Its editor doesn't do Newsnight or the Today programme to answer for his paper's daily blast of fear and loathing. ...So Dacre was there to defend the way his paper poisons the well of public trust in politics and everything in the public realm.
He did it satisfyingly badly. The committee, on the other hand, shone: a good example of how MPs can call the powerful to account. Dr Tony Wright, the erudite and forensic chair, led the questioning with an armoury of smart bombs, each of which went straight down Dacre's chimney and made indignant smoke come out of his ears. He may be no fool, but Dacre was casually ignorant on some basic facts.
In the rallies he switched between boasting of his 6 million readers (2 million circulation) and denying he had a profound influence on the psyche of the nation. "The Mail is just one of 10 newspapers," he would say disingenuously. But later he claimed: "We are the guardians of the truth." Accused of fanning the flames of xenophobia, alarm, dread and hatred, he said: "We reflect the fears and anxieties of our readers."
Did he feel he had any responsibility for the collapse in civic trust? No, it was all Alastair Cambell's fault. Read him out the first clause of the press code - the one that tells newspapers not to "publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted material", and he replies with a straight face that the Mail obeys it.
The Mail's founder, Lord Northcliffe said his winning formula was to give his readers "a daily hate" - and it does. But the Mail is just extreme: the PAC confronts the reckless irresponsibility of all the press. With its swashbuckling self-image of fearless investigator arrayed against the forces of darkness, the Watergate mythology allows it free rein to trample all government in search of peccadillos, with no accountability to anyone. Out-shouting each other in raucous search of "scoops" that are usually piffling, in the end sales and advertising revenues are the only real regulator.
Of course, the media is not "responsible". By what mechanism, to whom? We moralise, we apportion blame and sit as judges, but we owe no moral obligations to anyone and no accountability for the effect we have on civic trust, public values or human happiness. Pull it down, trash it, mock it, that's our trade....Dacre is only the most arrogant bully of us all: everyone else is in the same game for too much of the time. But a plea for reason, restraint and describing difficult problems in a complex world risks sounding like a nun in a lap-dancing club. If there were a market for it, we'd do it: that's the answer.
Next up at the PAC was Sir Christopher Meyer, the head of the Press Complaints Commission, the voluntary and largely toothless fig leaf financed and run by the press. He too was asked about the press code's first clause. Well, there are 4,000 complaints a year, he said. And they can call in newspapers proactively. But if so, then why, day after day, do so many papers get away with blatant distortions and grotesque misrepresentations? The PCC's committee of editors, incidentally, just refused to add a conscience clause to the code. Daily Express journalists complained to the PCC about pressure to write racist stories, but were told it had no jurisdiction. Since editors are subject to the code, the PCC said, journalists had nothing to worry about....So bullying works - until the bullied get brave enough to face them down.

That’s what this website is meant to do, to face The Mail and Tony Hetherington down, and also, even more, to raise the issues I have encountered over 15 years: how very well organized and professional criminals in the US use both the press and government channels and courts there to steal and plunder in the most profligate manner possible. Is this now happening in Britain? Only The Mail, in this instance and at the moment, can answer this question, but maybe soon we all can.
This is what my book deals with, especially chapters 18, 21, and 25, as the excerpts here will show.