This apology was a carefully crafted piece of lawyerese. As a result of the political and corporate heft of the fruit company, whose headquarters were in Cincinnati, a grand jury investigation got under way into Gallagher and the newspaper.

The company persuaded the judicial authorities to have a grand jury examine allegations of theft, fraud, trespass and invasion of privacy. The company did not address the substance of the allegations in detail. Fifty-six days after the package of stories was run in the paper, the Enquirer published a front page apology, renouncing the investigation. The owner of the paper also forked out more than $10 million to Chiquita to help salve its wounds.

The story caused a sensation and was exactly the sort of thing that good reporters and editors should be doing, as opposed to hacking into phones to eavesdrop on the minutiae of celebrity lives. However, in pursuit of the story, an Enquirer reporter, Mike Gallagher, hacked into the voice mail of the company's executives. Gallagher had used a password provided to him by a disgruntled corporate lawyer to access Chiquita's phone messages.

The newspaper accused Chiquita of circumventing laws in the countries in which it operated, bribing government officials in Colombia, exposing its employees to harmful pesticides, crushing unionised labour and not being rigorous in preventing the movement of drugs on its ships.

Did the fact that some of the material for the story was illegally obtained make the expose untrue? The widely held view among journalists and lawyers is that many of the shocking allegations were ''untainted'' by the hacked voice mails.

The apology and $10 million went to the way the story was broken, not the story itself. Nonetheless, Gallagher and Chiquita's lawyer, George Ventura, got probationary and suspended sentences, respectively, and the editor rusticated. So much for phone hacking in the public interest. Instead of hacking into phone messages, Gallagher would probably have been in the clear if a source had handed him a pile of illegally-obtained transcribed documents. Such are the distinctions upon which turn the ethics of news gathering.

What about reporting market sensitive public company information? Some reporters covering Wall Street and other financial centres have obtained passwords or PINs that allow them to plug into analyst briefings by listed corporations. Emails go around the Street to analysts saying there is to be a phone or inter-web briefing at such and such a time. Journalists simply plug into the call and listen to the briefing. What are the ethics? Some lawyers advising the journalists say that if there is a roll call they should identify themselves.

Avoidance of ambiguity may not be at the forefront of every journalist's mind. What if an important slice of corporate misbehaviour pops up during a conference call - maybe a company plan to save costs by stripping baby food of all nourishing ingredients? It would be a great story and decent journalists would not pass up the opportunity, even if they had plugged into the call under a false pretence or failed to properly identify themselves.

And the massive expose by London's Telegraph of expenses rorting by MPs. A computer disc with all the data had been stolen from the parliamentary fees office and the newspaper had paid the mole allegedly £300,000 ($479,000) for the information. The first response of MPs was that the publication was illegal and completely tainted. They might have got away with that but for the overwhelming public indignation about politicians plundering the public purse. Important public interest stories are published with the help of a journalistic trespass into forbidden territory. The danger is not so much lawless journalism but a prescriptive regime that does not recognise the tone of the music.