With the realisation that Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper, the News of the World, had done some loathsome things, MPs realised that they had moved into a looking-glass world. When once it was politically dangerous not to bend the knee to Murdoch, suddenly it was politically dangerous not to stand up to him instead – and standing up to Murdoch is presumably a lot more fun, to boot.

But what now? The presumption seems to be that no future proprietor can ever be allowed to accumulate such a large market share. Newspaper and television markets must be kept competitive for the good of political and cultural discourse. This was the idea behind referring Murdoch’s now-withdrawn bid for BSkyB to the Competition Commission.

As an economist, I’m always banging on about the benefits of competition – but in the case of media, they are less clear-cut than one might expect. Competition is usually a great process for giving customers what they want at a price they can afford. (Although let us not forget that key customers in the newspaper business are advertisers – and it was an advertisers’ boycott that brought down the News of the World.) But in the modern-day newspaper market, price is not necessarily the key issue. Many consumers are getting their news for free from internet sources, and many advertisers have moved online, too. The question is not whether readers and advertisers are being exploited by monopolistic prices, but whether traditional newspapers can survive.