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Coulsongate gets murkier.   Further evidence in the New York Times today from journalists who were on the News of the World when Coulson was editor has attested that mobile phone-tapping was rife.   It seems increasingly likely that Coulson knew about it, and quite likely encouraged it, though he has continually denied it.   There is no evidence that Murdoch knew about it, but that also seems quite likely.   There’s more to this than an ambitious young editor (Coulson was 34) determined to advance his career by getting juicy stories that other papers didn’t.

Murdoch’s News International has achieved a level of power where risks like this could afford to be taken.   The Press Complaints Commission which investigated the Mulcaire-Goodman revelations produced its usual feeble response.   News International commands a deep pocket to keep potential complainants quiet.   Even the police, it turned out, didn’t want to pursue their inquiries further beyond the two persons indicted, even though the evidence seemed to be there.   People at News International might well have thought they could get away with it.

This is a dangerous situation where Murdoch’s  empire already has such an octopoid reach within the British media that it begins to rival Berlusconi’s interweaving of business and political power through cross-control between so many press and television information, entertainment and knowledge outlets.   Infocapitalism, as it has been dubbed, should not be allowed here to go the way of Italy.

The media is not a plaything for power-drunk tycoons.   It is an area of public life where honesty, integrity, independence and diversity are crucial ingredients.   We should limit each newspaper proprietor to one daily and one Sunday, and no cross-ownership between the broadcast and the print media.   We should also limit ownership to those with British nationality.

We should have much stricter rules about market dominance because nobody should be allowed to exert undue influence over the national agenda or people’s awareness of it.  We should institute a legal right of reply (as exists in several other European countries) in cases of gross or damaging misinformation.    And we should radically revamp the next-to-useless Press Complaints Commission with a new and genuinely independent body with no more than a quarter of the membership from the practising media.

Given the Coulson saga and its murky background, it’s time for a public commission into all these long-ignored corners of the media establishment and to clean out the stables.   And if the Government won’t set it up, the newly elected Back-Bench Committee of the Commons should set the wheels in train for Parliament to appoint its own Commission of Inquiry (exactly as its Victorian predecessors did).