The media is out of control. But we can still worry about the behaviour of tabloids

For months now, the whole idea of the Leveson inquiry into press standards has been dimly reminding me of something. Only recently did I figure out what it was. You know when anthropologists descend upon some almost-doomed Patagonian tribe, desperate to document their language, costumes and strategies for spear-throwing, nose-boning and rat spit-roasting before the last one succumbs to alcoholism and keels over and dies? It’s a bit like that. It’s the Domesday Book for the British press.

This isn’t to say that there won’t be a British press 30 years from now. There had better be, or else some of us are going to be in trouble. But surely, by then, it isn’t going to look much like it does now. And I don’t just mean in delivery. Obviously we’ll never see actual paper — we’ll wake in the morning, obviously, and the Daily Huffington will have already been uploaded via 8G wireless networks onto the symbiotic pixels of our retinas and wallpaper — but the mechanisms and the corporate structures will surely be as different, too.

Roughly speaking, you can divide the industry at the moment between the hand-wringing, responsible press which has plummeting sales, and the shamelessly daft press, which remains fairly robust. The latter, though, is surely in a Wile E. Coyote stage; in that period of stunned, hopeful grace that happens after he goes off the cliff, but before the ground starts rushing up. There’s a slack provided by the inertia of class and age, as evidenced by the staggering 650,000 people every single day who still haven’t figured out how to stop reading the Daily Express. Surely, eventually, it’s going to go taut. And a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.