By Peter Preston

While US publications deserve praise for breaking the story, the changing cultural climate also has a lot to do with the movie mogul’s downfall

Applause for the New York Times, the New Yorker and for a sudden flood of witnesses putting Harvey Weinstein out of seedy, personal business. But Ryan Holiday in the New York Observer asks a cruel question. “How did the collective press – the Hollywood, media, gossip, and business journalists who follow every move of these power players as part of their job – miss out so badly?”

His answer: they didn’t, they were just “too cowardly” to print it, with examples of studied silence going back to 2000 and 2004, never mind NBC this very year. What he doesn’t quite say – the Jimmy Savile memorial lecture – is that 10, 20 or 30 years makes a huge difference to what society will tolerate in the momentum of exposure. Nothing to be proud of. But that was then, and this outbreak of revulsion and testimony is now.

• Think of an edited account of great press coverage like the Week. It’s a magazine and subject to all the bits of law and regulation that with that status. Then think of Google News or indeed any Facebook news coverage you care to name. They’re “platforms”, not publications, or so the tech giants claim even as - in Facebook’s case - they hire another thousand monitors to weed out offensive postings or ads. It’s becoming a difference without a meaning (as the chair of Ofcom told MPs last week). Regulation on an equal footing is becoming inevitable. That’s only Patricia Hodgson’s own personal view, she insists. But, in this debate, it’s also a watershed.