Mackenzie's honesty shows up his section of his profession for what it is

Having heard from numerous people on the receiving end of some of the worst excesses of tabloid 'journalism', we now begin to hear from the other side at the Leveson Inquiry. Kelvin Mackenzie, former editor of the Sun, has been disarmingly frank in his admissions as to his attitude to facts while in charge there, and extremely irritating in his so-called justification for some of those excesses.

He openly admitted that he once held the opinion that, "...if it sounded right, it was probably right and therefore we should lob it in." This is unbelievable. Stories that could change or destroy lives, would be taken as fact by millions, 'lobbed in' on the grounds that they 'sounded right'. That's basically a licence to say what you like about who you like, providing it's vaguely plausible to your own self-interested ears. This is what I've always thought the tabloids do anyway, but to hear it openly and unrepentantly admitted before the Inquiry was mildly surprising.

He says in later years he was 'less bullish', and that the Sun got more cautious after he left. But it sounds as though the reasons for that caution were entirely commercial, and his attitude to what goes to press is pretty nauseating: "If you publish it in the Sun you get six months' jail and if you publish it in the Guardian you get a Pulitzer prize," he said. "There is a tremendous amount of snobbery involved in journalism." What absolute bollocks. Has he noticed how the style and content of the stuff his 'newspaper' published, and publishes, compares to what goes into the Guardian, or any other broadsheet? 'Footballer Joe Bloggs's sex shame with X-Factor judge's daughter' - you know the type of thing. Typical red-top fare, but not something you'd likely see in the Guardian, to stick to his own example. Mackenzie need only examine his own paper's stories if he's after the real reasons why the different sections of the press are viewed so differently. It is not beyond a tabloid journalist's abilities to print what they want without attracting legal attention, but if it's less sensationalist it sells fewer papers.

Mackenzie even found time to have a pop at Anne Diamond, who has previously given evidence to Leveson as to the distress caused by tabloids turning up at her baby son's funeral. He called her a 'devalued witness' and claimed she should have been more hostile at the time, "...if she felt as strongly as she appeared to feel at Leveson you would have thought 20 years earlier she would have been massively hostile to us, and she wasn't." The woman was grieving the loss of a baby son at the time - just maybe she had other bloody things on her mind. The fact that she still feels strongly enough 20 years later shows exactly how hurt she must have been.

But, to people like this hack, this toad, this abhorrent weasel of a man and the equally ghastly, loathsome newspaper he once edited, since when has the hurt they can cause, or indeed, as he so openly admits, concern for things like the facts, ever been of the remotest concern? More editors, former editors, showbiz columnists etc, are due to give evidence yet. Expect more of the same greasy self-justification in the days to come.