Elites go to war to capture public hearts and minds

In fact there was a mild sense of entertainment. Mr Finkelstein, at one point in the delivery of Mr Hartigan's statements looked like he was going to morph into Mark Bouris in the celebrity apprentice boardroom.

You could see he wanted to say it, as if he were eyeballing Max Markson – "Harto, You're Fired!"

Maybe the public are consuming the online submissions and that's enough to keep them occupied. I don't think so.

So why are these teams lining up against each other in the name of the 'public good'?

Well, one side wants to keep selling newspapers to them and to continue to provide what they believe they want - blood, outrage, serial killers.

After all, the catchcry – if it bleeds, it leads - wasn't invented by The Christian Science Monitor.

The other side as was made clear by academics Margaret Simons and Martin Hirst wants powerful editors to be 'reined in' and corporate media owners to be force-regulated by government.

By this they mean powerful editors who have large publics - large audiences - rather than smaller news media such as Crikey which have small audiences.

In the world of commercial media, size is everything.

During the inquiry Mr Finkelstein played along with the power angle. There was no ambiguity in his comments about power, who wielded it, or whether it should be restrained.

John Hartigan made a point that has been around for a long time but is nonetheless a good one.

He said the news reading public, if they did not like the product, would stop buying it.