A manageable level of cynicism about the media actually serves the capitalist realist media system well. Since the media stands in for the public sphere, if journalists and politicians are perceived to be "all liars", as they widely are, then there is no hope to be had in public life at all. Hack expulpations appeal to a market Hobbesianism: they are giving people what they want but what they won't admit to liking. When, pickled in the jouissance of self-loathing and their other stimulants of choice, the hacks style themselves as "princes of darkness", they see themselves as reflecting the public's own disavowed cynicism back to it. Nobody likes working in the sewers, but don't you all love the pretty little globules of sensation that we dredge up for you?. Similarly, Glenn Mulcaire whines that the NOTW put him under pressure for results, this isn't only an excuse - what we're seeing here is in part the consequence of the intense competitive pressures at work in print media as its market share declines. Negative solidarity again: a race to depths so infernally pressurised that only alcohol-breathing subhuman crustaceans can survive there. (You only have to look at ex-NOTW hack Paul McMullan to see that.) As one by one those who played their part are dragged into the light, the old bullying sneers become familiar plaints: that's reality, we couldn't help it, that's how things are now ... But we must hear their excuses as indictments of a system: behold what a wretched state overwork and pitiless competition can reduce human beings to.