SHOOT The Messenger has long been a favourite game of politicians or celebrities who don't like a story that has been written about them. Blaming the media is a handy distraction from whatever they've said or done.

These days, however, Shoot The Messenger has a new player: the media itself.

When one outlet breaks a good story, there is no longer a begrudging congratulation. Rather, there is instant scrutiny of how they found it.

A case in point is The Sunday Telegraph's story last week about Alan Jones saying Prime Minister Julia Gillard's father "died of shame".

As soon as the first edition of this newspaper hit the stands, it was clear the story was going to be big. Social media buzzed with condemnation of Jones's remarks. Television and radio led bulletins with it.

The Fairfax-owned The Sun-Herald went as far as using The Sunday Telegraph's quotes to write its own version in a later edition as a "spoiler", giving the impression it had the story too, when in fact it was a shameless and blatant rip-off with no credit to the source of the information.

By Monday, Jones's extraordinary 45-minute response was the talk of Australia. But among the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald, there was a piece accusing The Sunday Telegraph's reporter, Jonathan Marshall, of ignoring instructions from the host of the Sydney University Liberal Club's dinner to keep all that was said "off the record".

Award-winning Fairfax journalist Kate McClymont had spoken to a guest at the dinner who was also a journalist and who claimed, on the condition of anonymity, that the emcee, Simon Berger, had asked any working journalist in the room to identify him or herself.

Marshall did not hear any such request and there is no evidence of it in a tape recording and transcript of the evening's speeches.

It did not happen.

The journalist was Mitchell Nadin, a former member of the Young Liberals who is a cadet journalist at The Australian, which is published by News Ltd, which also publishes The Sunday Telegraph.

Marshall gave his own name, used his employer's street address and never denied he was a journalist.

Yet, on the basis of one unsourced comment from a young man more anxious to stem the embarrassment his Liberal club had caused its hero Alan Jones, the SMH ran an editorial saying Marshall's conduct was "borderline ethical, at best".

This is despite the fact they themselves, on the Saturday night, ripped the story off - a deeply unethical act.

On Tuesday, the same newspaper ran a defamatory story about the journalist's background, in which much of the information was wrong. The SMH journalist who wrote that story, Damien Murphy, made no attempt to get a response to any of the allegations, which, after plagiarism, is one of the worst sins in journalism. Borderline ethical indeed.

This is not, unfortunately, an isolated incident.

Earlier this year, when The Sunday Telegraph broke the story that swimmer Grant Hackett had overused the sleeping tablet Stilnox, a Fairfax reporter rang this newspaper's editor, Neil Breen, to ask whether he had broken federal law and committed a jailable offence by illegally accessing Family Court documents to source its story.

For the record, we certainly had not and the story went on to win a prestigious Kennedy Award for Scoop of the Year.

Yet the default position of Fairfax seems to be that whenever we get a great "scoop" we have either been unethical or should be jailed.

This week, the only ethical breaches which occurred during the reporting of this story were the two by the Herald: one where it ripped the story off without proper attribution and the other when Murphy defamed our journalist and never asked for a response to the allegations he made. McClymont last Sunday should also have put the false allegations made by Nadin to The Sunday Telegraph.

Competition is healthy in journalism. For the past seven years, The Sunday Telegraph has shied away from criticising our competitors; we are of the view that our readers are not interested in, and not served by, haughty stories about what other newspapers are doing.

But on this occasion, we want to correct the record.

If this hasn't been the biggest story of the year, it has certainly been the most interesting.

Responsibility for election comment is taken by the editor, Neil Breen, 2 Holt St, Surry Hills 2010