Yet another jury has cleared more Sun journalists who were charged with offences related to the paying of public officials.
It is further confirmation that the police and the Crown Prosecution Service should not have brought such charges against people who were engaged in a practice that, for many years, was considered to be entirely normal journalistic activity at papers across Fleet Street.
Journalists who paid for information were unaware that they were breaking the law. Of course, ignorance of the law is no defence. But this was a law even teachers of journalism appeared not to know about.
Anyway, the other significant fact is that the people the CPS decided to prosecute were, in the main, reporters and relatively junior executives who were not responsible for the policy of payment.
I have appeared as a witness on behalf of Sun journalists charged with these offences and was prepared to have done so for one of the four who was cleared today, John Kay (a man who, incidentally, was so straight that when he first heard of allegations about phone hacking being used in other papers warned his bosses and colleagues not to touch it).
Kay, as anyone who has ever worked with him (as I did) will testify, is one of popular journalism’s nicest, most honest and charismatic characters. No university journalism tutor could teach reporters better than him.
He was mentor to scores, probably hundreds, of young reporters during his years at the Sun. Rarely does a reporter win accolades from his bosses while retaining the genuine affection of the staff. Kay did that.
Incidentally, a senior Guardian executive told me last week of his own deep respect for Kay and his sympathy for him. He should never have been charged, he said, shaking his head.
I sat in at his Old Bailey trial for a couple of hours when another of the accused, former deputy editor Geoff Webster, was giving evidence and was struck by the absurdity of the situation.
Webster, Kay and their fellow defendants - executive editor Fergus Shanahan and royal editor Duncan Larcombe - just couldn’t fathom why they were there. They were on trial for doing their jobs.
This was not, I must make clear, a case of advancing a Nazi defence about “just following orders”. These were experienced journalists who were indulging in their trade’s custom and practice.
Their task was to obtain stories. To accomplish that they required sources prepared to leak factual information that would not otherwise have been published.
Some of that material may not have been to my liking, but that’s entirely beside the larger point. It fitted the Sun’s editorial agenda. Anyway, the paper openly touts that it will pay for stories and, whether I like it or not, the Sun is a commercial operation. Paying for stories is simply part of the commerce. (Nor is the Sun alone in that trade, of course).
Anyway, I am relieved that the quartet were cleared. As I have noted before, jurors clearly do not agree with the CPS that what these journalists did was wrong.
The CPS will say that it was in the public interest to prosecute and that the outcome of the trial does not mean they should not have done so.
Sure, I might be able to accept that if the CPS had lost one case in front of one jury. But this is one of several losses heard before different juries.
And let me remind everyone also that no such cases would have been brought in the first place if the Sun’s ultimate owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, had not provided the police with evidence that revealed their journalists’ confidential sources.
This quartet, in company with a score of their colleagues, should be seen as scapegoats. After more than three years in limbo, initially on police bail and throughout a lengthy trial process, they have suffered considerable psychological strain.
We will look back on this in a decade and wonder that it ever happened. Hacking was one thing - a crime. Paying for stories is another - not, in my view and that of the Old Bailey jurors, a crime.