Next week six men will be sentenced for their involvement in the interception of voicemail messages on mobile phones. Between them, they were either responsible for hacking into the phones or knowing about such activity.

During an eight-month trial, jurors were told of hacking on "an industrial scale" at the now-defunct News of the World. Many thousands of messages on the phones of up to 5,500 people were illegally accessed.

The six are former editor Andy Coulson, three senior executives Greg Miskiw, James Weatherup and Neville Thurlbeck, plus reporter Dan Evans and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire.

These men committed a crime to which five pleaded guilty while one, Coulson, having denied it, was found guilty by his peers.

It is a remarkable story, unprecedented in the history of the British media, and arguably, a first anywhere in the world.

There has, sadly, been too little real attention paid to this reality by newspapers and broadcasters. The facts have been reported - just about in some cases - but the outcome of the trial, and its implications, have not been appropriately headlined.

They have failed to report the story properly. For example, one persistent claim emerged in today's papers and in TV reports, that an (alleged) £110m trial has resulted in "just" one conviction. This entirely ignores the other five guilty men.

The real cost of the trial to the taxpayer is not £110m

Let's deal with the money first. The total includes the massive defence fund provided by Rupert Murdoch. It is estimated that the cost to taxpayers will be £35m.

Anyway, the police and the prosecuting authorities were taking on a powerful international company that had, for years, deliberately denied the existence of hacking and later defied attempts by the police to investigate it.

The investigation proved to be complex, involving many, many hours of painstaking research into computer files. It was bound to cost money. Can anyone imagine how the rest of the press would have howled if the police had simply thrown up their hands and said it was too expensive to carry on?

The historic failure by the Metropolitan police to investigate previously meant there was a huge reservoir of evidence and allegations to deal with. It proved to be a big legal headache to access journalistic material, which had special protection, and this was compounded by technological problems in trying to retrieve 300m emails that had been deleted from News International's servers.

Therefore, the police were forced to invest considerable time and resources in ensuring that they carried out a proper job in order to obtain sufficient evidence to warrant a trial.

It is true that Rebekah Brooks, her husband and colleagues were found not guilty. But that does not negate the value of the wider exercise.

To read most of the coverage, however, is to wonder at whether newspapers really care about what happened, despite their knee-jerk mentions of hacking being an awful crime.

The hacking six cannot be compared to the Al-Jazeera three

Indeed, the conclusion of the trial has emboldened some papers to renew attacks on the Leveson inquiry, which was the direct result of the hacking scandal.

These have been accompanied by thinly veiled claims that Leveson, prime minister David Cameron and The Guardian are collectively responsible for an assault on press freedom.

But the hacking six cannot be compared to the Al-Jazeera three, who have been jailed for seven years in Egypt.

Nor should these six be seen as some kind of isolated cabal. That is not to accuse the rest of the News of the World staff of doing what they did; it is to underline what the court was told of the "pervasive" culture at the paper.

In others words, the pressures on the journalists to get stories by any means allied to a lack of corporate oversight were major factors.

I would go further. Although the NoW was undoubtedly a rogue newspaper, as I wrote several times and way before the hacking scandal broke, its journalistic agenda and the methodology some of its reporters employed, was not confined to its Wapping newsroom.

The knowledge of how to hack into mobile phones was known to other journalists on other newspapers. And these reporters were under similar pressures to obtain stories. Newspapers that belittle the significance of hacking have reason to avert their gaze from such truths.

Meanwhile, several editors have sought to divert attention from the main issue by perpetuating a myth about the revelation that transformed the hacking scandal into an international story.

This was The Guardian's report in July 2011 that the News of the World had intercepted voicemail messages left on the mobile phone of Milly Dowler, the 13-year-old girl who was abducted in 2002.

The paper's report, based on multiple sources, also stated that some messages had been deleted by the journalists in order to free up space so that more could be left.

"As a result," said the article, "friends and relatives of Milly concluded wrongly that she might still be alive." In other words, Milly's family had been given false hope.

Amid the resulting furore after publication, David Cameron instituted the Leveson inquiry into press standards, not just at the News of the World but in all newspapers.

Most national newspaper publishers and editors were bitterly opposed to that inquiry from the outset. Then, in December 2011, the Metropolitan police issued a statement - first reported in The Guardian - which stated that although the News of the World had hacked Milly's phone the newspaper's staff were unlikely to have been responsible for the deletions.

It was possible that the deletions had happened automatically but the police could not be certain how they occurred, and it is widely acknowledged that we may never know.

The myth about the Milly Dowler voicemail deletions

From that moment on, publishers and editors - including those within Rupert Murdoch's organisation - have claimed that the Leveson inquiry and the closure of the News of the World were entirely due to The Guardian's inaccurate July 2011 report.

That is the myth, one that has gained widespread credibility throughout the media ever since. It features in newspaper editorials and commentaries. Broadcasters have taken it up as some kind of gospel. It was repeated on the Radio 4's Today programme by John Humphrys this morning.

Repetition of a lie does not make the lie correct, but the nature of myths is that they are difficult to counter, not least because the devil, as so often, is in the detail.

And detail is hard to deal with in a three-minute TV or radio interview, especially when newspapers antagonistic to The Guardian, and to the Leveson inquiry, continue to publish the falsehood. But the details require attention and have been spelled out in this article by Nick Davies.

There is not a scintilla of proof that the prime minister's decision to set up the Leveson inquiry rested solely on the voicemail deletions. The fact that the News of the World had been responsible for hacking into the murdered girl's phone was itself shocking enough to warrant an inquiry.

Even if the Dowler case had not proved to be the trigger for political action to curb press misbehaviour, the subsequent revelations about the interception of voicemail messages of people bereaved by the 7/7 tube bombings or the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan would surely have done so.

As Lord Justice Leveson wrote in his report, the hacking of Milly's phone "rightly shocked the public conscience in a way that other stories of phone-hacking may not have" and "in that context" whether or not News of the World journalists had deleted messages was "almost irrelevant."

It is also important to grasp that the News of the World's closure had been discussed by Murdoch's executives prior to the Dowler story.

Moreover, on the day that Brooks told News of the World staff the paper was to close she claimed to have "some visibility" of revelations to come. There would have been "another two years of trouble" ahead, she said, if the paper had not been closed. That gives a lie to the idea that closure was the result of a single story.

The final irony, of course, is that this Fleet Street falsehood and distortion is the very stuff that concerned Leveson during his inquiry.

So the newspapers that attacked his report and continue to spread myths about hacking are the very ones that wish to go on regulating themselves.