This has provided a useful backdrop for some spectacular special pleading from media owners.

The need to rescue journalism has, for industry lobbyists, been rapidly translated into a need to feather-bed dying industries that have shown no interest in the promotion of any reasonable standard of journalism for some decades. 

So alongside the special pleading for the removal of media concentration, cross-media ownership and monopoly rules, all of these demands run concurrent with the kind of geographic consolidation that is removing local journalists and creating top-down managerial 'news factories' that have nothing to do with the local communities that they serve, as this report from my old manor illustrates.

It remains to be seen if any slackening of regulation will run alongside obligations to invest, but I wouldn't hold your breath on that score.

But the obligation to invest is key here. And if the newspaper industry should be obliged to invest in the production of content in return for regulatory leniency, surely other carriers should also be asked to invest in the content that drives the demand for their services? 

I don't know about you, but when I sign up to that broadband deal and pay for an increase in the capacity of the pipe that comes into my house, I'm not drooling over loads of ones-and-zeros. I'm thinking about all of the great content that I can download. Content carriers have made billions on the back of content producers, and the producers have not seen a commensurate benefit by any means.

Here, the broadcasting unions BECTU and the NUJ have done the groundwork that OfCOM should have done. Obliging carriers to invest in public service-standard content is a proposition that is long overdue. Read it and spread the word - it's a hugely important piece of research - and you can't expect it to be talked up by many industry lobbyists....

Gordon Brown, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted to do: under the cover of pro-market rhetoric, to massively increase taxation and spending, to facilitate schemes which increased the size and reach of the state. Why? Because he was, and is, at heart a socialist who believes in collectivism. He just realised he needed to be cunning to get it past the electorate.

Now, come on. Come on. It's true that you can read this sort of thing on Have Your Say any day of the week, and it's fun to point and laugh at the people who post there. But Iain Martin is paid to write this stuff, and it displays all the empathy and psychological insight and moral complexity of an episode of Scooby Doo.

We Labour people - what motivates us? The state. That's all. We love the state. We want the state to grow big and fat. We want to increase taxation, purely so the state gets more money. The state is not a means to an end, it is an end in itself. There is such a thing as society, and it is the same thing as the state. That's what we all believe. All of us. Obviously. Because that makes perfect sense as an account of our motivations and core beliefs. Oh, hang on a minute - it doesn't.

The idea that Labour politicians and Labour voters, including Gordon Brown, might be motivated by a desire to end poverty, to improve health and education, to make it easier for people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds to fulfil their potential - that they might see the redistribution of resources through state institutions as important ways to work towards those things, but that the driving purpose is to make people's lives better rather than to make "the state" bigger - doesn't appear to occur to Iain Martin. Perfectly legitimate political disagreements about how best to achieve uncontroversially good goals are ignored for the sake of a lazy, implausible caricature. If you think your opponents start with "Tax is good" rather than "Poverty is bad", you need to think again.

It's not as if accepting the good faith of your opponents doesn't give you plenty of space to criticise their methods as ineffective or inefficient. It's not as if it doesn't give you plenty of space to deny that their purposes are desirable. It even leaves you space to accuse them of incompetence, if you feel like it. That's more than enough room to have a proper political argument. You might even find that your critique is more credible that way, and that people outside the Daily Telegraph's immediate audience don't assume you're an idiot whose views can be disregarded without further discussion.

If I wrote "David Cameron just wants to give money to rich people because he's a posh millionaire who went to Eton and hates the poor", Conservatives would rightly point out that this an absurd and stupid mischaracterisation of Cameron's position (some Labour supporters do indeed argue like this, of course, and we can all agree that they shouldn't). When it goes the other way, does it stop being a smear?