I bet they've had death threats through their stations website/facebook page ( unless they stopped the possibility of posting ).

Like the great chicken and egg question: which came first – the infantilised media or the infantilised public it serves by creating an infantilised public discourse?

No market, no media.

If people stop buying/listening to the squawking harridans, they'll shut up eventually.

I did not follow this tragic story but was not the Briitish press at fault? Was she hounded? It may be that she could have got over the initial embarrassment but maybe the press follow us was too much? If so, any organisations concerned should be named, shamed and penalised (along with any complicit editors and proprietors).

No sign of it happening thus far, unfortunately. And so everyone suffered the consequences of a dumbed-down public discourse.

Worth noting: the only two UK national dailies that didn't use this as an excuse to splash yet another royal story over it's front pages on Saturday were the FT ands The Morning Star.

She probably got a right good fooking off her gaffers, although they denied it.

They would, wouldn't they?

I think I pointed it out on the Leveson thread, but the problem in this country is that people (mainly the older generation) seem to buy newspapers purely out of habit, rather than any serious newsreading.

My own parents have bought the Mirror for years and recently, after I once questioned their reason for buying it, my mum simply replied she got it for the TV pages!!

Similarly, I once worked with a now retired guy, who brought the Daily Mail to work everyday, despite being one of the most anti-Tory blokes I have ever known - His reply was that he had always bought it and that his wife liked the women's section...He openly admitted that he thought the majority of articles were complete nonsense, yet he still bought it daily!!??

I think what the papers do quite cleverly, is drag people in with the trivial stuff (Horse Racing, other sport, TV, odd bits of travel, etc) and then once they have a captive audience, they can put across their own political agendas.....It is no less brain washing, than all the stuff that the Nazis ever did or that the North Koreans are doing now, yet they manage to hide it under the excuse of freedom of speech.

I think this is pretty much spot on – although I do think it's perhaps a bit more cross-generational.

And all that, of course, leaves you wondering what a 'free press' really is.

I am sure they are genuine in their romorse and what transpired following the hoax was not foreseeable by anyone, but they could do one thing in her memory and that is to get a job with a real media outlet rather than one that targets the Jeremy Kyle set or as the Yanks say 'low life trailer trash'.

A free press is one owned and run by a multi-billionaire who has absolutely no agenda whatsoever to push, run by executives and managers of no political affiliation or preference, in a completely non-partisan way, in nobody's pockets, with the sole aim of making as sure as they can that the public gets the truth.

Here is a full list of all the world's free press: