When the News of the World was so abruptly closed last July, the then chief executive of News International stood in front of a roomful of soon-to-be-unemployed journalists and told them: "In a year's time every single one of you in this room might come up and say 'I see what she saw now.'"

With the mass settlement of claims against News Group Newspapers, we are, indeed, beginning to glimpse what Rebekah Brooks meant. It is difficult to think of any precedent for a newspaper company so abjectly and serially apologising to a group of claimants. In numerical terms – around three dozen on Thursday – this was merely the tip of an iceberg: we now know there are at least 800 confirmed victims of phone hacking. But the most remarkable and significant aspect of the court hearing was the basis on which the aggravated damages were assessed – what the judge described as "an admission of sorts" - that senior employees and directors of NGN knew about the wrongdoing under their noses; and that they sought to conceal it by making public statements they knew to be false; by deliberately deceiving the police; and by attempting to destroy crucial evidence – including computers and a vast number of emails. In other words, they agreed damages on the basis that there was a cover-up at the highest levels within the company formerly chaired by James Murdoch. If proved, that would be a shaming indictment of an organisation whose currency is the uncovering of truth and the holding of power to account.

It will be for the police and Crown Prosecution Service to deal with the lies and the obstruction of those who were trying to get at the truth. But the dramatic eve-of-court climbdown by News International gives an indication of the company's mindset and modus operandi. Despite his public displays of contrition (the "humblest day" … "We are sorry") Rupert Murdoch remains a street fighter. The aggression and denials continued right up to the courtroom door, and it took some bravery from a determined group of claimants – as well as some skilful lawyering – to force the most powerful media company in the world to back down and reluctantly tell part of the truth.

Of course, the whole truth – the "visibility" Ms Brooks told her former colleagues she had and which was denied to them – is still only partially revealed. We still know only a fraction of the picture of who knew what when; who ordered whom to do what; who lied to whom; and who attempted to destroy what evidence when. It will take court hearings, whether criminal or civil, to flush out details that even now remain concealed. Parliament has also played its part in this – painfully, over years, extracting documents and evidence from reluctant and forgetful witnesses. So has the press. The statement by the claimant lawyers was generous enough to single out the role of this newspaper, along with the New York Times, in achieving Thursday's result.

All the evidence from any civil and criminal inquiries will eventually be passed to Lord Justice Leveson, who is currently trying to piece together a wider picture of how this particularly grotesque perversion of journalistic ethics sits in the overall landscape of the British press, politics, competition policy and policing. There's a trope in some journalistic circles to the effect that Leveson is much ado about little. This settlement is a sharp reminder of why they're wrong. The most dominant newspaper company this country has ever known was, for a period, malignly and dangerously out of control – deceiving police, regulators, press, public and parliament – and was within days of doubling its size, revenues and influence. That's why there's a public inquiry. At nearly every turn in the phone-hacking saga the truth has turned out to be worse than anything initially alleged or imagined. As NGN's lawyer tried yet again to close down the discovery of further documents relating to the cover-up, Mr Justice Vos said it was "hugely in the national interest to find out what was going on". He's right.