Will Self on phone hacking: 'We are all to blame'

Will Self has said that we all must take the blame for phone hacking and other unsavoury practices by the media.

In a column written for BBC News, the novelist claimed that there are larger concerns raised by the Leveson Inquiry than "ostensible issue of privacy".

"It is these wider waves of amoral sepsis pulsing through the body politic that should concern us more, these and the still more fulminating malignancy of our own appetite for scandals of all sorts, but the more lurid the better," Self said.

"When it comes to the phone hacking disease and its hysterical sequelae we are, indeed, all to blame."

He continued: "This is Andy Warhol's future, where, courtesy of reality television and talent competitions, everyone can be famous for 15 minutes because the idea that renown should follow from substantive achievement has been completely abandoned.

"The trouble is that we are no longer a free people. Instead, addicted to prurient titillation and apathetic to the point of nihilism, the entire sweep of our recent history proclaims us to be a nation that knows the price of everything - especially our houses - and the value of nothing. "

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