The difference between the two, to be sure, is often obscured because some tradesmen get ideas above their station. They want to be Sir Larry or Sir Nick or Lord Bent Copper. They see their tabloid pulpits as platforms for their own greater influence and glory. They expect to be honoured for walking on the slightly grubby (if not dark) side. But, in numbers and in influence, they do not stand at the heart of this argument. Rather, they're irritating peripherals.

No, the basic divide is much clearer than this, and well demonstrated by John Lloyd's case. Either you see journalists as a structured part of society, fulfilling a designated, purpose-built role — or you see them as loose cannons prone to fire too wildly. And if they cause too much political damage as the cannons resound, then they're over-weening and out of order. Society has to find ways of bringing them into line.

It's a broad case currently argued by many clever and influential journalists, from Martin Kettle of The Guardian to the great editor I'm still learning to call “Sir” Harry Evans. Martin Kettle wants editors hauled up before a committee of MPs at regular intervals to explain themselves in public and thus endure a little democratic accountability. Harry Evans wants yet another royal commission. And, of course, like John Lloyd, they have many solid points to make. Other journalists may — and do — resent such criticism, but it's sincerely meant and argued with necessary force: a call to do better that we need to respond to in our separate ways.

For newspaper editors aren't prime ministers (thank heavens!) or even prime anythings. We have enough trouble running the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), let alone Great Britain Inc. When one of our former tradesmen, Michael Foot, climbed near to the top of the greasy poll, anxious electors ordered extra helpings of grease. A country where Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre rule the roost, too evidently is a country whose balance has tipped far out of kilter, whose puffed-up pundits need cutting down to size. But not, please, with all the heavy weaponry of the State on formal parade.

Save us from more commissions and committees, more coded ways for the politicians to finger our lapels. Save us from a structured existence. For the model itself – the model of a perfectly ordered society with a fourth estate nestling snugly in place – is false and deluding. A free press, to function properly, has to be precisely that: free, messy, fallible, as unfettered and unorganised as humanly possible. Freedom, remember, is also the freedom to get things wrong. That may not make instant sense when you watch barons like Mr Murdoch twisting arms. It may stick in the gullet when one of the red-tops goes over the top, or one of the qualities swims in sanctimony. Nevertheless, in the world where practicality and broad principle exist, there is no other way. Look around and see for yourself.

Route to corruption

Professional status, duly arranged to fit its niche in society, may be an enticing prospect. Many good journalists are brilliant men and women, as brilliant as the doctors or QCs or architects they went to university with. But now, as they look around, their professional chums bask in a warm glow of public approval while they are merely upmarket hacks, covertly despised from Downing Street to the Inns of Court, guilty by association with the News of the World. No wonder they don't like the doorstep brigade, the snatch photographers, the swaggering publishers fawned over from Number 10 to Number 11. No wonder they feel their business is running out of control and must be brought to order.

These are all perfectly understandable, perfectly natural conclusions. On any average politicking day — as the Mail lays into Tony Blair or the Mirror takes an axe to Michael Howard — it is possible to recoil and think things have gone too far, that it's the democratic system itself we're degrading. Often, too, the reaction is less political than human: at the vileness of sneering attack which, on the one hand, traduces a Cherie Blair you know and admire, or — the other hand — mounts coded onslaughts against poor Moslem immigrants who can't answer back. Remember Mr Grouser from Toytown? “It ought not to be allowed, sir.” The raging is contagious.

So finely-spun doctors arrive bearing prescriptions. So society is urged to find ways of putting baleful anarchy to rest. So the law must intervene and Parliament must act, or a commission advise. So on and so forth. But move beyond Grouser's cry that “something must be done”. Ask, rather, what specifically can be done? The strongest advocates of doing something often work in public service broadcasting and, when taxed, will say that the press ought to work within the kind of legislative framework that encases them.

The BBC is free, isn't it? Up to a point, Lord Grouser. Free to lose a director general and chairman in the Gilligan wash. Free to watch its governors appointed in Whitehall, its whole funding method in pawn from decade to decade, its activities constrained by quangos old and new. That is a kind of freedom, one which the fierce independence of its staff generally makes safe, but it is not a press kind of freedom. It cannot easily campaign or proselytise or turn over stones. It isn't where ideas start to burgeon or reputations are made. Its strength, at root, depends on the parallel strength of a free press.

But couldn't that press be a little less rowdy and embarrassing, a trifle more house-trained? Couldn't it be more like The New York Times and less like The Sun? Perhaps, but it will have to travel that road of its own free will. Self-regulation — the voluntary foundation of a Press Complaints Commission, the writing of an editors' code — is one thing. The heavy boot of the law, kicking it into subservience, is very much another. Of course newspapers can't be blithely indifferent to what their readers think of them. They exist and work in a context which demands a certain grudging credibility, if not quite that overblown commodity, trust. They need to be believed, and the present headlong decline of red-top sales signals all too clearly when belief is missing. But there is also another context that, in Britain at least, dictates its own terms. Think competition, for competition is the vital ingredient so many critics leave out.

Nothing too shocking

Competition means different views, different perspectives, different choices. It is a vital under-pinning of a democracy sustained by competing parties. But it also means dissonance and exaggeration and, sometimes, desperation. And that, I think, is the place that John Lloyd and his theories don't quite reach. Is the press vital to a party's rise and success? Ask the Liberal Democrats and you'll get a pretty dusty answer. They win, time and again, without a single supportive editorial voice to back them. Is the press so thunderous that it can make or break careers? Look at the Thunderer and other News International titles and you see just the reverse: allegiance to Blair and New Labour, for as long as they look like winners, anyway. Can the press warp perceptions and foment too many flimsy hatreds?

Of course, the charge of over-emotionalism made by Andrew Marr in the book he shrewdly calls My Trade is one we all need to take to heart. But if we're too slow about it, then another paper will soon put us to rights. When terrorists seek to make a propaganda killing from hostage killing, some press people will point that out and the coverage will lose its frenzy. When refugee figures are calculated to terrify, some other paper will recalculate them to calm.

That is competition. That's the way our non-system works. We have the PCC and a pooling of sovereignty that counts for much more than outsiders suppose, but we also have a right to our freedom — including, as Lord McGregor of the PCC used to say, the right to be wrong. So two cheers for John Lloyd, because his book and his arguments are part of the process. But I think I know, at heart, what works best for my trade. Yes, it's rough, ready and indeed often wrong. But it also bears a passing resemblance to necessary freedom.