Belief is weird. Weirder than the platypus. For one thing, even though belief really ought to be a binary state (you either believe something or you don't) it's still possible to be surprised when one of your beliefs is subsequently proved to be true, thus implying you didn't really believe it all along – or that maybe your brain believed it, on some floaty intellectual level, but your gut stubbornly refused to accept it as truth.

For example: all my life, I've been surrounded by people who claim not to trust anything they read in the papers – the tabloids especially, but often just "papers" in general. It's particularly easy to wave in the general direction of the showbiz pages and sniffily dismiss the whole thing as a daft work of fiction. Every celebrity interview ever conducted contains a section where they moan about reporters making stuff up. Stupidly, they moan about this to other reporters. But hey ho. There's a film to plug.

Anyway: everyone knows and accepts in their bones that showbiz news is almost certainly fiction, yeah? So when you eventually stumble across a report regarding something you have some first-hand knowledge of, and that report turns out to be peppered with inaccuracies, exaggerations and inventions, you shouldn't be surprised, right? Of course you shouldn't.

But it is surprising. Several months ago, I read a small story about a female celebrity who'd been foolish enough to appear in public wearing the same dress two days in succession. This "style slip-up", the article stated, was "the ultimate celebrity faux pas". It described how a crowd of expectant fans was "taken aback" when the star "turned up in exactly the same dress again, accessorised with the same black skyscraper heels." The piece was illustrated with two photographs showing the celebrity sporting her incriminating outfit on two separate occasions, accompanied by the caption 'Looks Familiar'.

But interestingly, the clothes weren't the only familiar thing in the frame. If the dates were to be believed, the strands of hair from her fringe had fallen across her forehead in precisely the same way, two days running. I don't know much about haircuts, as anyone who's ever glanced at my head can tell you. But I know that looked suspicious.

Fortunately for all mankind, I knew someone who'd been present on both occasions. So I asked whether the same dress had been worn on both days. No, it hadn't. Both sets of pictures had been taken on day one.

Presumably what happened is this: rather than sending a reporter to attend the event itself, the paper had received a batch of photos from a picture agency and interpreted them back in the office. But tragedy struck when someone got the dates muddled up, and a "style slip-up" was subsequently believed to have occurred when it hadn't. Easy mistake to make. But hang on: what about that description of a crowd of "expectant fans" being "taken aback" by "the ultimate celebrity faux pas"? That was just a cute detail the reporter had invented. Some people they'd wished into existence. Nothing wrong with that. After all, some of our most respected authors have built their careers on simply making stuff up. JRR Tolkein, JK Rowling, Jeffrey Archer . . . towering masters of invention, the lot of them. Apart from Jeffrey Archer.

Anyway: that dress. So what, you might think, not unreasonably? The dress thing is fluff. Harmless fluff. You'd be hard-pressed to find a story of less national importance than a woman apparently wearing the same skirt twice in a row (although a man occasionally sharing a hotel room with another man probably rivals it). Let the dress thing go. Let it go, goddamit. It was months ago. Put it behind you. Move on. Step back from the ledge. There's still so much to live for.

And OK. Begrudgingly, I admit you're right. Nevertheless, something about it astounded me. There's a difference between assuming most showbiz stories are bullshit, and reading one you know definitely is. No matter how small and insignificant the made-up story ultimately is, it shatters your faith in the media: faith you didn't even realise you had.

I was reminded of this after reading about the latest twists in the ongoing News of the World phone-hacking scandal, which, at the time of writing, isn't getting much coverage outside of the New York Times, the Independent, and this newspaper.

Surprisingly for a story involving Cameron's chief spin doctor, Scotland Yard, the royal family, several MPs and (potentially) hundreds of celebrities, the press hasn't had much to say on the matter. Why not?

For one thing, covering it without first corroborating the New York Times' evidence might be legally risky. On top of that, there's a general (and self-serving) sense that readers aren't interested in stories about the machinations of the press. Add to that a reluctance to shine a light on the "dark arts" of news-gathering (it's hard to cry foul on phone-hacking if you've done it yourself), factor in the obvious awkwardness inherent in reporting stories featuring friends or rivals, and you've got a story that could've been designed specifically for the press to ignore.

The thundering silence accompanying each fresh revelation shouldn't be surprising . . . and yet somehow, as in the case of the starlet's dress, it is. Surprising and depressing.

The phone-hacking affair is one of those stories where the media itself becomes the elephant in the room – an elephant that's steadfastly ignoring all the smashed and trampled furniture, and is sitting quietly in the corner, mumbling about Hague's sexuality and the Pakistan cricket squad, and occasionally nodding off mid-sentence to dream about an imaginary crowd gawping in astonishment at a dress they didn't see. Or to put it another way: an unreliable narrator with the fattest, greyest arse you ever saw.