Illustration: Andrew Dyson.  Illustration: Andrew Dyson.  What
happens to media reform now? The government, having declared the
urgency of its reform package, has promptly dumped it in an
admission of defeat. It's a story of such political mishandling
that it undermined a sitting prime minister. But it's also the
story of a diabolical policy problem that might now never be
solved in this country. Given the potency of the issue, it is
worth considering why it's so thorny.  A good starting point is
to note that the story that set this issue alight - that
Britain's News of the World had hacked into a murdered
schoolgirl's phone and deleted voicemail messages, giving her
friends and family false hope she was alive - was incorrect. The
hacking happened, but the most outrageous part of the story
didn't: the messages were probably deleted automatically. Five
months after The Guardian broke the original story, it published
a colossal correction notice.  And yet, by then the damage was
done. The Leveson inquiry was we