@Sqad - Lets see shall we? Jim Devine, Elliot Morley, David Chaytor, Lord Taylor of Warwick, and a few others still under investigation. What I understand from your post is that you think that the public over reacted, and the whole affair was a storm in a teacup?That it was unimportant in the overall scheme of things? C'est La Vie? Would that be right? and are you essentially saying the same thing now over the NotW phone hacking issue?
If so, I think you are wrong.In the case of the MP expenses scandal, State elected officials ripping off the public purse and feathering their own pockets is corruption and abuse of power and is rightly something to get upset and indignant about. We should hold public officials to a very high standard. And the system has been changed - we now have a much more transparent, much more accountable, and much more controlled expenses system, and rightly so.
And the same applies here. The public are right to be shocked and angry at the worst excesses of gutter journalism. It would be nice if they recognised the gratuitous prurience of their own desire for gossip and titillation also, but it does not detract from the fact that NI / NotW were systematically, amorally, arrogantly and illegally invading peoples privacy in persuit of stories that the public might be interested in but were rarely in the public interest.
So they appear to have routinely broke the law. They routinely, it appears, corrupted the police. And what the episode illustrates is that through their assumed power and hold they had on the public, they were able to intimidate and scare what appears to be successive houses of largely spineless MPs. Not a healthy situation.
Sometimes, distateful as it might appear to an onlooker, public disgust and anger is necessary.