Under Conroy's plan, PIMA would have monitored the performance of the Press Council and applied a public interest test to any transactions that might further reduce media diversity.

Given more time, a better policy may have emerged, but Conroy had apparently lost patience with a process that included a report by former Federal Court judge Ray Finkelstein and another from the independent Convergence Review. In the end, MPs had a week to pass the legislation. It was an impossible timetable and maybe that was the point.

It was not the first time Labor has messed up major changes to the media. Indeed, Conroy probably wouldn't have needed to act if Bob Hawke and Paul Keating hadn't allowed Murdoch to buy one of Australia's biggest media groups, The Herald & Weekly Times, back in 1986, creating the high concentration of ownership the senator now openly regrets. This lack of diversity is a far greater threat to democracy and plurality than any independently appointed advocate.

Back then, Hawke and Keating were motivated by revenge. They were convinced the HWT was their enemy and needed to be brought to heel. News is convinced the Conroy reforms were driven by similar base motives. Whatever the truth of that, Murdoch has again emerged the winner, just as he did a generation ago. (He's had less success in Britain where new press regulations were agreed on last week, over the protests of proprietors.)

Whatever the politics of the Conroy proposals, a great opportunity to improve self-regulation of the press and, I believe, its standards, has been lost. But it needn't be.

In September 2011, after the appointment of the Finkelstein Inquiry, I wrote that I thought the preferred outcome should be a beefed-up Press Council. It remains my view. Ironically, when the former Federal Court judge finally delivered his report in February last year, it was pretty much his view, too. But he made one crucial mistake, which allowed News and other vested interests to decry his proposals and, ultimately, spook the government.

Finkelstein recommended the establishment of a News Media Council to set journalistic standards in consultation with the industry and handle complaints made by the public when those standards were breached. As a nod to convergence, the council would operate across all platforms - print, radio, TV and online. The Press Council would become a statutory body, even to the point of getting secure funding from government. While some might have been discomfited by that - and its right to dictate where and how apologies should be run - Finkelstein offered up this by way of comfort: ''Beyond that government should have no role.''

But then he over-egged the proposal, as only a lawyer and former judge might. He introduced the threat of court sanction for editors who did not go along with the findings of the proposed council. Worse, he concluded: ''Any failure to comply with the court order should be a contempt of court and punishable in the usual way.'' This raised the prospect of editors going to jail for failing to publish an apology. That one clause in an otherwise persuasive 468-page report was a gift to those who wanted to paint him as an enemy of a free press.

The sad irony about Conroy's flawed and ultimately failed process is that the news industry itself had the most to gain from winning back the trust of a public increasingly sceptical of its motives and its work. Having huffed and puffed and seen off government-driven reform, it is open to proprietors to initiate their own improvements to self-regulation: they should substantially strengthen the Press Council with the goal of restoring the public's faith in its processes. In that sense they could walk their highfalutin talk. It's long overdue.

Bruce Guthrie is a former editor of The Age and The Sunday Age.

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