Say what you will about the sad case of the late Jade Goody – and almost everyone, it appears, has found an opinion to express – there is one lesson from the whole episode that press and broadcasters should take to heart. At the end of her brief and pitiable life, Ms Goody was able to dictate her own terms to the media, and trade an intrusion of apparently limitless extent for a substantial cash benefit to help her family. Now, other people in similar situations are going to do exactly the same, supported in their stance by a series of judgments resulting from actions by celebrities against picture agencies and the photographers who work for them.

The rise and death of Jade Goody has drawn tears from a vast public and at the same time roused a smaller group to bitter criticism of the media. In Radio Times, Sir Michael Parkinson dismissed Goody as “a woman who came to represent all that’s paltry and wretched about Britain today” and wrote that “she was projected to celebrity by Big Brother and, from that point on, became a media chattel to be manipulated and exploited till the day she died”. In the Daily Mail, A N Wilson’s view was that “the sadistic, voyeuristic medium of so-called reality TV was simply a fly-trap waiting for someone such as Jade to come galumphing along and satisfy the cruel, moronic tastes that the programme sets out to satisfy”.

But although Jade Goody would never have commanded public attention without reality television – a springboard for fame born out of exploitation and, often, humiliation – her status as a national figure owes as much to other parts of news media. Some of the coverage was redolent of the 18th-century beginnings of the popular press with its broadsheets of convicts’ “last confessions”, sold along the three-mile route from Newgate Prison through Holborn and what is now Oxford Street to Tyburn and the gallows. Jade Goody was still alive when OK! magazine, appallingly published a blackbordered “memorial issue” (Wilson’s “cruel, moronic tastes” accusation was substantiated when only 60 members of the public complained to the PCC).

Jade Goody is like a figure from the distant past of humanity: victim and heroine at the same time, and known to the public only by way of intermediaries. In ancient times, she would have given rise to a cult with a priesthood; in the present she is the most recent in a line of popular figures magnified by media attention to such exaggerated proportions that large numbers of the public come to believe that they have a real personal relationship with them – there were immediate and obvious signs that the next target to be so hyped would be Susan Boyle from Britain’s Got Talent.

A belief in a direct personal relationship with the famous, if not the unhealthy ambition to emulate such spurious fame, surrounds heroes and heroines in other spheres: why else, for example, would grown men buy expensive football shirts with other people’s names written on their backs? The truth about people in the public eye is, of course, that they are seldom quite as amiable as the images they project, although mainly it would be heartless to disabuse the public of the illusion of friendship and identification – for some, illusions are the most comforting things they have. But that does not excuse parts of the media for callously exploiting those illusions.

One can only speculate what the coverage of Jade Goody’s illness would have been like if she had not been able to control media exposure through an agent and reap financial benefits for her family. Certainly, some other celebrities who have found themselves the targets of unwelcome media attention have discovered a method of curbing it through the courts by asking a judge to protect then from harassment. The actress Sienna Miller and the singers Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse were separately granted injunctions curbing the activities of photographers. All three were represented by a barrister, David Sherborne, who was quoted in The Guardian as expecting that more people in the public eye would seek similar injunctions “when they realise something can be done about it”.

If that happens, publications based on the fashion for celebrity will find themselves deprived of significant, circulation-stimulating material unless agreement with the stars has been obtained, probably through agents and requiring copy and picture approval and a substantial fee. The popular press is halfway there, anyway, and the total collapse of celebrity journalism into showbiz and sport-controlled puppetry cannot be far off. Those media outlets that can’t see the train coming may survive just long enough to reflect that throwing themselves in front of it might have been a better option than clambering aboard.