Mal Fletcher comments

We the public seem to have an unwritten contract with newspapers and the electronic media. There are lines of ethical propriety and general humanity that shouldn't be crossed when gathering news on celebrities, yet we may tolerate certain levels of intrusiveness when it comes to people who make their living by courting publicity.

We will not accept the same levels of intrusion when they are applied to ordinary members of the public. What is so repugnant about the News of the World situation is not simply that ordinary people were being spied upon, but that many of those who were targeted were at their most vulnerable.

Most often, this type of underhand data-mining is done not in the name of important issues of public interest, or hard news, but for the sake of entertainment value. The common perception was that the News of the World would do almost anything to sell newspapers; that it believed the ends - making money - justified almost any means.

Indeed this is the real issue: in this age of celebrity obsession, multi-media news platforms and competition with social media, will news generally move in the same direction? And what will that mean to public trust?

It wasn't just the press that came under scrutiny during the News of the World saga; important questions were also raised about the police. Have police personnel routinely received payments for information given to journalists? Did British police effectively sweep earlier allegations about phone hacking under the carpet, rather than running a thorough investigation?

At around the same time, in separate developments, the courts were placed under the microscope. The conclusion of the Milly Dowler trial saw the emergence of a string of impassioned charges about the way courts of law handle crime victims.

Meanwhile, a new study called into question the selection process for British judges. It suggested that judges are hopelessly out of touch with the general public, socio-economically and ethnically.

Commenting on all of this in early July, I warned that great care would need to be taken to ensure that the public did not lose trust in either the police or the courts in the way they had already done with government and business.

With the riots across some of England's major cities, this is precisely the situation that has ensued.

The public mind has been focussed on the ability of its police to respond to large-scale unrest and the readiness of its courts to deal adequately with the aftermath. Those people who complained about the sentence given to Charlie Gilmour, have now been drowned out by the much louder cries for tougher sentences for public disorder offences.

Indeed, we are left wondering whether we really want a police 'service', or a police force. The answer, of course, is a bit of each.

We need police organisations that have enough social awareness to avoid making bad situations worse. But we also need them to have the bite and the appetite to deter crime wherever possible and to manage it with sufficient force - and no more - when it occurs.

Educational institutions are also coming under increasing scrutiny, as universities respond to new government parameters regarding fees. Increasing numbers of high-level students are faced with the possibility that they may not be able to get into the course of their choice - or that they may not be able to afford it.

For many students, university is becoming less of an option now. They may need to find other alternatives to university and the coming-of-age experiences it provides.