MPs expenses: let's hear it for muckraking journalism and ink on paper

Whatever you think of the rights and wrongs of MP's expenses, one thing is clear. Without a newspaper, in this case The Daily Telegraph, this story would never have surfaced. The only one of the broadcasters that might have been bothered with it, the BBC, would have required balls of steel to take it on. All the bloggers in the world wouldn't have been able to access the data and, if they had, they wouldn't have been able to make the same splash about it. It's a grubby story but newspapers are, at their best, a grubby trade. Maybe you won't miss them when they're gone. That could be the most disturbing thing of all.