Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
Press freedom is about the right to challenge powerful people and hold them to account; the right to rootle around in the dank undergrowth to hunt down corporate and political crocodiles, using whatever weapons you can muster.
Press freedom is also about the right to run idiotic stories about foolish people desperate for their 15 minutes of fame; the right to use subterfuge to expose the greed or hypocrisy behind a star's "wholesome" public image.
But to go too far with the latter is to risk losing the former. If we wield our greatest power against the insignificant, what do we have left to fight the important battles?
The Sun should be feeling chastened this week after the collapse of the Tulisa court case that forced it to suspend its star investigative reporter (a story, incidentally, that made several front pages but surfaced only on page 13 of the Sun).
Yesterday's splash was a serious examination of the state of the NHS. Today the paper has regressed to its Comic Cuts persona, which wouldn't matter if it didn't involve demonising -  I use the word advisedly - a four-year-old boy.
It will also inevitably bring a fresh chorus of that old favourite "The (Murdoch) Press must be tamed".

What kind of brain thinks that a sinister picture crop of a clearly identifiable child coupled with the heading "Boy, 4, has mark of devil" is acceptable?
The Sun apparently believes this was a "light-hearted" treatment of the story of a boy whose parents spotted a strange mark (one that happened to resemble the pattern seen on many a hairdryer grille) on his chest.
They took him to the GP, who was apparently baffled. They asked teachers, who were equally bemused. 
Then they did what any sensible parent would do: they posted pictures on Facebook and contacted American websites that specialised in "mysterious body marks" and abductions by aliens.

They also came to the attention of the SWNS agency, which took photographs of Mum and son, helpfully pointing towards his chest. Gosh, that was fortuitous. 
The mark duly faded on June 16 after three weeks (don't you love the precision of the date), but the craving for attention didn't.  
And so, thanks to those SWNS pictures taken nearly two months ago, the boy makes the front page of the Sun today.
The "light-hearted" treatment involves the use of such words as "sinister", "horrified", "nightmare"  and the mother saying:

Yes, it does sound crazy. It is crazy. 
This woman needs to get a grip and so does the Sun. 

The fact that a parent agrees to their child being photographed in the knowledge that it might be put in the public domain does not mean that it should be put in the public domain. 
The fact that these parents do not respect their son's privacy does not mean the Sun should condone and capitalise on their foolhardiness. It should exercise responsibility on their behalf and save them from themselves - for the boy's sake.

Yes, it's the silly season and now a marker has been put down. Watch out for a rash (sorry) of stories about mysterious symbols suddenly appearing on kids' bodies.
Think of crop circles, think of the Virgin Mary turning up on a cheese toastie. Harmless nonsense (not that the farmers would agree). But if children start branding themselves with anything other than a marker pen, someone is going to get hurt.

Interesting story in the Sun today about Esther McVey who was inexplicably the focus of all the press coverage of the reshuffle last week.

Mass briefings about bringing in more women meant Esther's picture was everywhere - but she didn't get a new job, all that happened was that she was allowed to sit in on cabinet meetings.

SubScribe wondered whether Esther had gone in for a bit of self publicity but Tom Newton Dunn puts a much more worrying slant on the Downing Street parade.

The cabinet biscuit duty was an afterthought because McVey had gone to No 10 in her finery in the belief she was to be promoted - and when she was told she was staying out she took Cameron at his word and refused to budge until he came up with something.

So Cameron - or more probably Lynton Crosby - blatantly used a government minister as eye candy and a publicity prop.

Or as a smokescreen for the real story - Gove and the Palinist Nicky Morgan.

This is the Tories spinning out of control.

SubScribe on the reshuffle.

There's an old-fashioned look about the Guardian this morning. What could it be?

Oh, it's forgotten the puff!
Forgotten? Or decided that its splash is so important that nothing should diminish its impact?

As SubScribe has noted  before, the Guardian is not a popular member of the Fleet Street gang. The phone hacking saga made it few friends, and its holier-than-thou air doesn't help.
Here we can see an example of why it gets up people's noses. 

Edward Snowden's leaked documents from America's National Security Agency not only let the world into the secret of how the Obama administration listened into Angela Merkel's phone calls, but also won the Guardian a hatful of awards, including a Pulitzer prize and being named Britain's Newspaper of the Year.

Snowden is clearly important to the Guardian. But how far up its own backside does a paper have to be to think that this source - an American living under asylum in Russia - and his opinions on forthcoming British legislation are of overarching significance to its readers?

People concerned about invasions of privacy, infringements of liberty and rushed legislation do not need their concern validated by the foreigner whose actions, more than anything else, led to this situation in the first place. And those who support the proposed new laws are the very last people who would be swayed by the fact that the "traitor" Snowden is against them.

Snowden's views may be worth reporting - The Times and Mail think they are, while at the same time both making the point that he is the reason for this week's legislation - but as a top-to-bottom splash on a puff-free front? 
And with the boast that these opinions were shared during a seven-hour interview in a Moscow hotel, "one of only a handful of interviews since he sought asylum a year ago"?
As one of the key conduits for Snowden to get his material out into the world, there is nothing surprising that the Guardian should get to interview him. What is surprising is that there is an air more of privilege than of entitlement that Snowden should now choose or agree to speak to the paper.

Readers are promised the full interview later in the week. Wonderful.

*The Government has said that the legislation being pushed through this week is merely formalising the existing arrangements. For an alternative view, please see this from Graham Smith.

The Daily Mail isn't having a good week. George Clooney has had two pops at the paper in two days and thrown its apology back in its face. Angelina Jolie is reportedly ready to sue over the old video plastered all over yesterday's front page.
The rest of Fleet Street is lapping it up, schadenfreude doesn't come close.
Is this, then, why it has today made such a big deal about a three-par note in the Socialist Worker's Troublemaker column?
Vile, tasteless, inane, disgusting? A page one picture and page 5 lead? It's a bit overblown for a lame joke pointing to the opening of the inquest into the death of 17-year-old Horatio Chapple.
The father of one of Chapple's contemporaries (note, there is nothing to say that they were friends) who says: "That the Socialist Worker thinks the violent death of a child  is a fit subject for humour indicates a level of depravity and insensitivity to the suffering of others which is surprising."
The story is bolstered with a selection of tweets - a retweet by Owen Jones of the Guardian being the cherry on the cake - and the Chapple family history. 

To be fair, the Mail is not alone in hunting this particular fox. The Telegraph was also outraged enough to put the story on page 5 under the heading "Outcry after socialist paper mocks death of Eton boy in bear attack". 
It quotes the same clutch of tweets and then adds this to the mix:

Reportedly? Reported by whom? Either he is or he isn't. If he is, then it is germane to the story. If he isn't, it shouldn't be there. It is a  fact (or rumour) that should have been checked before it got anywhere near appearing in print. The Telegraph is a national newspaper, for heaven's sake, not the Upper Bumbling Weekly Bugle.*

The Mirror, Independent and Huffington Post have all reported the "outcry", even though when you look at Twitter, there were surprisingly few people crying out. Owen Jones single-handedly doubled the number of tweets when a hundred or so people retweeted his retweet.
It has also been the subject of discussion on Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 programme and on Radio5Live.

For heaven's sake. It was a tasteless comment with a crass headline best ignored.
The Socialist Worker sells about 10,000 copies in a "bumper week", according to Ian Burrell, the Independent's media expert in an article after the death of Thatcher last year. 

Ten thousand. In a bumper week.

• The Mail  sells 1.7m copies a day and has 11m readers online
  
• The Telegraph sells 515,000 with a further 3m online readers
  
• The Independent reaches 1.5m online
  
• The Mirror reaches 2.5m online 
  
• The Huffington Post has 84 million users
  
• Jeremy Vine is Britain's most popular radio news programme with more than 7m listeners a week.
  
• Radio5Live has more than 6m listeners a week.
  

Bet the Chapples are thrilled to see that they have such universal sympathy and support. 
For that was, of course, the Mail and Telegraph's intention, wasn't it? They weren't just setting out to show that "socialists are nasty bastards". Were they?

*SubScribe can't be sure, but thinks the Telegraph may have muddled Charlie Kimber with Hugo Charles Kimber, son of  the late Sir Timothy Kimber and brother of Sir Rupert Edward Watkin Kimber, the 5th baronet Kimber. Hugo is seven years younger than the Socialist Worker chief.

The Mirror and Sun share a heart-warming (no pun intended) splash about a woman who "sensed" her dead son's heart beating in another man's chest. It appears in a number of other papers too. But whether it's the "most amazing" story you'll read or even a "miracle" depends on your astonishment threshold. 
Freda Carter had wanted for years to find out who had received her son John's heart, but hospital rules allowed her to be told only that  the recipient was a teenager called Scott. 
Last year she attended a memorial service for transplant donors. A young man called Scott gave a reading. She put two and two together and came up with four. Happy days for everyone.
The meeting took place in November, why it has surfaced only now is unclear. But that's probably beside the point.
The Carters live in Sunderland, Scott lives in North Shields,  the transplant and the service took place in Newcastle. 
Mrs Carter isn't psychic, as the Sun tells us. This isn't an 'of all the churches in all the world' chance-in-a-zillion story. It's one of a determined woman overcoming bureaucracy (in place, incidentally, for good reasons of privacy and emotional stability) to achieve her heart's desire (pun intended).
Let's hope that she can be content with this as her happy ending.

For comedians, timing is everything. For newspapers, timing can mean nothing.
When Marco Rodriguez blew the whistle on Germany's dissection of Brazil at 10.47 on Tuesday night, the presses had already printed tens of thousands of newspapers. Some held back editions, but no sports editor will have felt that their Wednesday paper had done the match justice.
Newsdesks, too, will have wanted to get in on the action - they'll have gone into yesterday's morning conferences with schedules full of ideas for follow-ups.
It's what happens when you're a journalist. "No show without Punch", someone once teased me when I went scuttling into work on a day off when a big story broke. We all want to play, to feel part of the main event. Hands up any Fleet Street journo who waited for the phone to ring before turning up when Diana was killed.
The hardest part is accepting that you aren't needed, that the caravan has rolled on without you.

Fourteen million people are said to have watched the Brazil-Germany game; thirty-five million tweets were posted about it. By the time this morning's papers were delivered, the best part of 36 hours had passed since the match had ended, another semi-final had been decided, we were all looking forward to Germany v Argentina. Would readers want to look back?
The Mail was convinced they would. It put Mick Jagger on the front and said that Brazilians were blaming him for the defeat. He was, we suddenly discovered, known in Brazil as a jinx. There was a spread in the news section - more on Mick, some jokes lifted from the web and a full page of Max Hastings on "the awesome (and chilling) genius of the Germans".
Enough? Not a bit of it, there was a further "superb World Cup pullout" labelled "the match that rocked the world" in the heart of the paper - eight pages of punditry, oversized pictures and more jokes from the internet.

The Mail has never been one to worry about being late with a story if it thinks it's good enough to interest its readers - today it catches up on the Times's tax investigation, for example; the SubScribe pictures and spreads blog predicted that it would come back and beat the rest when it missed the Peter Blake Albert Hall mural. It did. So I would hesitate to say that this was OTT, but it felt it.
To be fair, Mick made an appearance right across the street. The Sun, which got a cute splash with a good head from a chef who bet a fiver on the result and came away with £2,500, quoted Jagger as saying he was prepared to take the blame for the first goal, but not the rout. Good on him and good on the Sun. The Jagger story was the lead on the 4-5 spread, complementing another two pages in sport. Job done, time to move on.
That seemed to be the standard response. The Times ran to six pages in its World Cup supplement, but for most it was a couple of pages in news with a bit of rioting and a bit of cultural commentary,  plus a couple more in sport. The Telegraph offered extra value in its news half-page with a panel on previous examples of the Jagger jinx, plus a delightful Matt cartoon.

But the Mail's rivals had catching up of their own to do, starting with that Angelina Jolie video. The Express and Mirror both took the same approach: celebrating the actress's achievements since the film was made. Neither mentioned the Mail and the Express declined to offer directions to the video online, which meant that for new readers starting here it will all have seemed a bit odd - why were they suddenly running Jolie's life history?
That's where the difficulty lies when the internet is light years ahead of the old inkies. How much should you assume the readers know? If you think they know (chances are they've seen the story on your own website as well as everywhere else),  why tell them again? And if they don't, you owe them some basic background. So those who left the Jolie non-story alone were probably wisest.
There was one Mail story, however, that almost everyone took delight in reporting: that correction and apology to George Clooney.
When a rival has to eat humble pie, there are always those who ready savour that other dish that's best served cold.

'Why are we wasting money on this when we could be spending it on that?' is a favourite argument of the partisan. It's usually spurious. But this collection of front pages does make you wonder how the Press came to be the arch-villains of the unholy trinity of politicians, police, Press. And that in turn prompts further questions about the extent and expense of the phone-hacking inquiry.
First we have two peers (one Labour, one Conservative) under suspicion for rape. Then there is the disappearance of 114 files from a 1983 dossier alleging that a number of public figures were involved in child sex abuse. And finally we have more allegations against Rolf Harris, who was jailed for sexual assault on Friday.
Putting Operation Yewtree and celebrity sex predators aside for a moment, let us remember that we also have the Cyril Smith allegations rumbling along in the background - thanks almost entirely to the Daily Mail - and suspicions about a minister in the Blair government that are being brought to light by the Daily Mirror. 
Those with short memories might also be reminded of the MPs' expenses scandal and the men who drained moats with our money, the women who declined to pay for their own bath plugs, the flipping and flopping of houses to avoid capital gains tax. We know about them thanks to the Daily Telegraph.
These are the people running our country; the people who decided that the law wasn't strong enough to keep the Press in line, that a £5m public inquiry, followed by a royal charter, to set new parameters of behaviour was required.
MPs accepted after the expenses scandal -  without the benefit of a public inquiry - that they couldn't be trusted to police themselves, so an independent parliamentary standards authority was created. It's made a huge difference. In 2009, the year of the scandal, MPs' expenses totalled £95.4m. In the year to last September, the total was £98m.
The police, particularly the Metropolitan force, meanwhile remain mired in corruption allegations that any number of public inquiries and new brooms at the top have been unable to stamp out. They have failed properly to investigate murder, wholesale sexual abuse and assorted other crimes - including phone hacking at the News of the World. Stephen Lawrence's killers were finally brought to justice not through dogged detective work, but  in large part because of the law-breaking bravery of Stuart Steven when editor of the Mail on Sunday
Eight out of ten of today's front pages* are devoted to historic crimes and alleged crimes involving men in high places abusing vulnerable women and children; offences dating back to the 60s, 70s and 80s; crimes and alleged crimes that were widely known about, yet which troubled neither police nor politicians until very recently.
Police operations looking into old  journalistic misdeeds are ongoing, and the Daniel Morgan inquiry is unlikely to do anything other than give sections of the Press an even worse name, but SubScribe has not so far heard any suggestion that journalists were involved in sex abuse rings or systematically defrauding the taxpayer.
Those who believe that the state should play any part in determining how the Press is regulated  might care to show how police behaviour has improved since the establishment of the IPCC in 2004 and how MPs have curbed their excesses since IPSA was set up in 2009.
There are chancers and criminals in every walk of life, but they tend to gravitate mostly towards areas of power, influence and money. So a few police officers are corrupt, a few MPs are criminally greedy, a few celebrities are sex abusers, a few journalists are unethical. It's all a matter of proportion.
If the Press is allowed to do its job, if good people are attracted to public life, and if the law is allowed to function, we'll come out on the right side - eventually. Then we can work together to defeat the financial sharks who rob us all.
*The other two focus on terrorism;  it's Serious Sunday.

Here then, is Paul Harris's take on what was behind the Murray meltdown (another one for the underscore collection)...
Kim had she dumped him, announced she was pregnant or let slip the end of a television series?
Amelie seen sprinting up to the players' box - a last-minute change of tactics?
Judy arrived late, having been watching her other son Jamie on an outside court - sibling rivalry?
So much for the women. Harris moves on to other possibilities: could his dog be ill? Was Murray eating too many bananas? Or maybe he just had an off day.

So in spite of the caps in the puff and the underscore in the heading, we still don't know what WAS  behind the Murray meltdown. 
But, thanks to the Times website yesterday afternoon, we do know what was behind the "five ******* minutes before the match". It was the amount of notice the players were given before they were called on court.