The sight of the Prime Minister under attack for his cosy relationships with newspaper owners and tabloid editors should not distract us from the unpalatable truth that there's another player in the hacking scandal - ordinary members of the public.

It might not be popular to say so, but we are equally complicit, as readers and purchasers of the News of the World.

It fed our obsession with the excesses of celebrity culture, from sex and drug scandals to priapic footballers. To be honest, wasn't buying the News of the World a bit like snacking on crack?

You're soon hooked and, even if you claim it's just for entertainment, your attitudes get coarsened in the process of reading the stuff.

Fans say it reflects the British obsession with sex and crude humour. I think it's responsible for a brutal and demeaning attitude to women and the trumpeting of a high-minded morality that its owners seem to have forgotten. Does it sum up our best characteristics?

In the battle for readers, the tabloid Press competes to come up with scoops revealing increasingly intimate details about the private lives of public figures.

Our appetite for all this stuff grew out of the multiplicity of television soaps over the past 30 years and the massive cultural impact of reality TV.

Soaps and reality shows projected ordinary people into our living rooms and we couldn't get enough information about these new heroes.

We've turned into needy couch potatoes who require a constant supply of trivia. It seems to have been a short step from hacking into the phones of celebrities, to picking on public figures and politicians and then the victims of crime - a descent into madness that we funded all the way.

It's all to do with 'sexing-up' copy, embellishing it with details that can hook in readers and make a version of a big news story distinctive.

We are repulsed to discover that non-celebrities thrust into the spotlight - the families of the girls murdered in Soham, servicemen killed on duty and the victims of the 7/7 bombings - all seem to have been the subject of illegal activity that sought to obtain material to be used in this way.

To News of the World journalists, a story had to 'deliver' and there was no difference whether it starred Kerry Katona, John Prescott or Milly Dowler.

Why did we not realise when we read such intimate accounts of private events that the nuggets of information they contained might have been obtained through deception and illegal hacking?

The truth is, a lot of us enjoy our news presented just like a spicy telly soap.

Even the BBC is guilty of crass news presentation that takes unfolding events and showcases them as popular drama.

During the last hours of Raoul Moat - the murderer on the run in Northumberland last year - reporters were positioned around Rothbury flapping their hands trying to appear well-informed while Moat was under police siege. This Press overkill turned him into a sick folk hero in the hour of his death.

I'm not shedding a tear for the death of the best-selling newspaper in the UK; far from it. Others are more sentimental - the columnist Carole Malone said "It's been in our lives and on our doormats for decades."

Bought by rich and poor, the size of the readership meant that the paper attracted more AB readers than any of its upmarket rivals. News was gradually sidelined by a toxic mix of gossip and speculation - a mix we all bought into.

For years, Parliament, the Press Complaints Commission and our prime ministers all decided to do nothing as the darker side of tabloid news-gathering grew to feed changing public taste. Police probes were botched, reports from the Information Commissioner and select committee ignored.

Now, we're promised a big clean-up. But the only way to end this culture is not to fund it. And that means not buying whatever replaces the News of the World.

The question is: are we grown-up enough?