Some of these objections amount to no more than the oft-heard grumblings that the media are inhabited by louts who should put their peel in the litterbins instead of letting it lie where unwary celebrities might tread on it. Others are ill-founded appeals against the law of gravity itself, aimed at softening the landings of the famous or ambitious. But there are complaints that deserve more serious attention, because they call into question not only journalistic methods, but a key purpose of the trade.

In The Spectator, for instance, Leo McKinstry attacked tabloid newspapers in the course of a defence of Education Secretary Ruth Kelly, who has been embarrassed by the intricacies of a system intended to keep paedophiles out of jobs in schools through which they might have opportunities to commit offences against children. Mr McKinstry accuses the tabloids of a witch-hunt against people who may or may not be potentially capable of child abuse and of encouraging another form of it. “For the real child-abuse problem in modern Britain is not in Whitehall but in our sex-fixated, relentlessly hedonistic public culture, where modesty is now viewed as abnormal,” he wrote. “The downmarket tabloids and TV channels, now self-righteously pontificating about Kelly’s future, have helped to build this culture, making money from the cult of instant sexual gratification.”

It is not the business of the BJR to take sides in the Ruth Kelly controversy: its concern is with Mr McKinstry’s denunciation of selective media outlets (although he might well be right in damning the sexually-titillating teen glossies and explicit “blokemags” that crowd newsagents’ eye-level shelves). He looks back to an Arcadian age when children were unsullied by being taught about sex, but it seems unlikely that many readers would support a newspaper or TV news editor who took a similar attitude and tried to turn the clock back to that era. They would rightly scorn media so out of tune with the times and reluctant to acknowledge one of the disturbing realities of the 21st century. In truth, with so many sources of information available to the public, the media have little choice but to reflect the views of their readers on matters of personal morality: to do otherwise would be regarded as hypocritical.

And the practical consequences to society are not so clear-cut as he claims and others believe. According to Mr McKinstry “all this uninhibited sex education is not working. Britain has by far the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in Europe. An astonishing 5 per cent of all London girls aged between 15 and 17 have been pregnant”. But a view from the United States is that “deprived of proper sex education, American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have a abortion, and 70 times as likely to have gonorrhoea as girls in the Netherlands”. The quotation is from a new book, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, and the author is former President Jimmy Carter.

A foolish claim

George Galloway MP, setting out to use the hideous but apparently compelling television show Celebrity Big Brother as a political platform, ditched his credibility on the pavement alongside his lurking banana skin through his own over-confidence, not media attention. Nor could Liberal Democrat leadership contenders Mark Oaten and Simon Hughes cry foul, although there were others to do it for them as they bit the dust (John Lloyd, the Financial Times contributing editor, has become the press’s in-house Mary Whitehouse).

The days are past when the Palace of Westminster was a castle which kept within its walls the secrets of its population, whether peers, MPs or those whose work depends on them. Yet there are still men and women who believe that they are invisible to the inquisitive eyes of the media, and behave accordingly. It may be regrettable that the public is more interested in personal lives than political policies, but it is the failure of those in the public eye to behave with some propriety, not the media coverage this attracts, that puts them on the skids.

The future will see an end to the prevailing fashions. Celebrity, sex and even football will lose their holds on the mind of the public. Sven-Göran Eriksson will cross to the other side of the street, thereby avoiding the kind of dramatic pratfalls that occasioned the announcement of his premature departure from the role of England manager. (Observer sports columnist Paul Wilson deplored the press coverage of Sven’s latest debacle; it was “as if the News of the World had a bona-fide scoop and the landscape had suddenly been dramatically altered”. The landscape promptly altered.)

When that day comes, the media may find themselves again as deeply excited by foreign policy as was Britain in 1852 when The Times revealed a secret the Government wanted to hide, and John Delane, its editor, or his leader-writer, defended its publication in a famous phrase: “The press lives by disclosures.” Don’t let any of us forget that.

Awardsgate

The Editors’ Forum, now renamed the Grand Jury, meets to decide on the judging structure. One newspaper vetoes the editor of the BJR’s membership of the panel that will vote for the newspaper of the year – to be called the Academy – apparently on the grounds that in the past he has been critical of that paper in print. As “the Grand Jury deliberations are made in an understanding of strict confidentiality” (Charles Wilson, chairman of the judges), the name of the newspaper in question cannot be revealed. It was The Sunday Times.

Despite everything – “Grand Jury”, “Academy”, control-freakery, pomposity, small-mindedness, even the renewed possibility of flying bread rolls and fisticuffs remaining part of this sorry tale – the BJR’s award will, for now, still be part of a circus that could attract a government health warning if it wasn’t so funny.

As ever, we wish the Awards well.