The race is already on to tell the big story about the News of the World / News International scandal. The details are still fast moving, of course. It has the excitement of a quick finish in speed chess.
But for a whole class of the commentariat, this is the moment either to fit the story into their continuing narrative, with a sort of "I told you so" tone to it; or, maybe rather more interestingly, when "I told you so" would be a stretch, to shift to some degree the story they are telling.
In the "fitting into what I've been telling you for a while" category comes Peter Oborne, with a brilliant and well-deserved vindication in the Spectator. Oborne has written a whole book about the over-cosy relationship between national media and politicians; Murdochgate fits most easily the story he has been telling: Parliament needs to be strengthened and made more independent; we have slid into an executive dominated politics with almost no checks, and the press, which should have been helping, has not done its duty both because of the power of intimidation of media groups and because the press and the politicians for a single social group with their own interests to protect. Oborne's is the voice of the principled conservative let down by the gentlemanly system he thought he was serving.
From a million political miles away comes another "told-you-so", Paul Mason, on his BBC blog, for whom there is a new politics of contestation about that has arisen in the cracks formed by financial crisis and social media. For him, Murdochgate shows that the power of social media changes politics as much in Parliament square as in Tahrir square. Mass media of old, he thinks, were all about "manufacturing consent": a sort of decentralised propaganda machine, they made sure that the whole system worked well for corporate and political interests. The scandal has shown that this was the case, but it is so no longer. In a bit of a stretch, I think, he attributes the crumbling of the old order to the Avaaz campaign and the fact that social media has broken the grip that Murdoch had on news. But is it really credible to think that the scandal would have blown over without Facebook? Looks like he's trying too hard to fit it into his current "told-you-so" story.
More intriguing to me is Matthew Parris's comment in the Times (unfortunately behind paywall) in which he appealed nostalgically to the proletarian values embodied in the News of the World and celebrated their role in keeping those in power honest, even if by slightly dishonest means. Here is someone with a deeply Tory sensitivity trying to appeal to working class values and using Marxian language to describe his appeal. Now that does seem odd. What is going on? Is this the "big society", one nation proto-coalition to keep an eye on: elite Tories supporting an assertive working class identity in order to pincer the Guardian-reading center-ground of British politics?
My attempt to clear up the question was in Sunday's Intelligence Squared Hot Topic: "If you've been in bed with Assange, you shouldn't be throwing stones at the News of the World." I won't spoil the whole of it, but I do think that this is a good old left/right story, internecine within the media-political class as Peter Oborne would have it ... with some interesting twists.