English comedian Steve Coogan, a popular member of Britain’s cultural elite, turned up on BBC’s Newsnight last Friday evening to give his tuppence-worth on the phone hacking scandal concerning News of the World, the recently closed British Sunday tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (which also has American media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News under its belt).  “You’re morally bankrupt!” he roared at former News of the World editor Paul McMullan, who dared defend the paper’s repeated invasion of privacy on the program.

Coogan, himself a victim of phone-hacking, rounded his condemnation with “you’re just trying to find out who’s sleeping with who.” So, it seems, not only were the paper’s methods underhand and immoral, but its priorities were crass and the truth it sought to uncover mere “title-tattle,” as the broadcaster and equally irate Newsnight guest Greg Dyke chose to put it.

Rupert Murdoch’s closure of News of the World after 168 years of circulation has widely been celebrated as a victory for good taste. The tabloid pedaled a lurid blend of sensationalist news coverage mixed with scoops about celebrity drug and sex scandals. It was a publication no self-respecting metropolitan middle-class man or woman would be caught dead with, a shame comparable with being spotted in the terraces of a greyhound race wearing a string vest while chugging on a Strongbow cider can.

Still, the paper’s folding is being lauded by the press as a vindication of moral principle, and the result of popular anger. Its appalling conduct in hacking into the phones of the general public, let alone those of politicians and celebrities, has received the attention and condemnation that it deserves. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that the near-Victorian moral crusade against “this sort of journalism” – namely, invasive tabloids that cater to the public’s base hunger for the details of celebrity misdemeanor – is at root a media-led outrage. It is a class war of sorts, waged by the high-brow, broadsheet establishment against this “lower” form of journalism from which they try to distance themselves.

The distinction is crucial, forming the basis of the journalistic elite’s moral authority as enlightened political and social commentators. Frank Furedi, writing in Spiked Online, elaborates on this “cultural elite’s crusade”:

Time and again, journalists claim to have detected a powerful public revulsion against the machinations of News International. […] In truth, this ‘public fit of morality’ is actually confined to a relatively narrow stratum of British society. […] Depicting a media insider-led coup as an expression of people power is a self-serving fantasy. Will history characterise a campaign from above which involved a few hundred people and which succeeded in shutting down a newspaper read by millions as an expression of people power? I think not.