This is written on the day the Mail on Sunday splashed with the publication of an ‘astonishing secret memo’ written by Tony Blair to close colleagues. Here are the first few paragraphs.

Tony Blair has delivered a savage attack on Gordon Brown in a secret memo accusing him of playing into David Cameron’s hands by his ‘lamentable’ and ‘vacuous’ performance as Prime Minister.

The former Prime Minister boasts that Mr Cameron was ‘in trouble’ before he resigned a year ago.

And he claims Mr Brown’s incompetence has made the Tories look like the party of the future and on course to win the next Election.

No-one has suggested this memo is a forgery, like some of the sensational scoops the Mail has carried in the past. But you do not have to be a journalist to doubt whether this was really worth making the main story.

When you get to paragraph thirteen you discover that the memo was actually written nearly a year ago, shortly after the Labour Party Conference. And the label ‘secret’ is clearly un-justified. It was a private memo written to close colleagues, and, even ex-Prime Ministers are entitled to write to close colleagues without being accused of plotting.

But you don’t discover that before you read this paragraph.

The bombshell disclosure comes as it emerged that Mr Blair has had regular talks with his close friend and political ally, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who challenged Mr Brown’s leadership last week.

All the press agrees that Miliband challenged Brown’s leadership last week. The Mail slant implies that Miliband only jumped after talks with Blair. Entirely likely that Blair talks to Miliband. But no hard evidence about what they talking about.

The Mail has two accompanying stories.

The screaming headline one is:

Can Gordon win? Only 16 of the 22 Cabinet Ministers say yes

The story starts with saying that six cabinet ministers believe he should go. But hey, wait a minute. What about the sixteen who told the Mail that he should stay?

The second story is headlined:

1 in 3 say Brown is worst PM … and half say he must go now

Just how this poll was conducted is not clear, but it is not out of line with many opinion polls in the last few weeks.

In another story the Daily Mail reports that:

Senior ministers rally around PM as government heads towards meltdown

This story reports that three senior ministers, Alastair Darling, Harriett Harman and John Denham, have declared their support for Gordon Brown. It does not say that this news was announced in an article they did for the News of the World, part of the Murdoch press.

But my first point in this article, is that the Daily Mail is giving its readers real news, at the same time as doing its best to sell newspapers, which it has been doing since 1894, but that it also does, what its first proprietor, Lord Northcliffe started, covering the news in a style and language accessible to newly literate masses.

The Daily Mail still subscribes to the myth of journalism, including the split between ‘fact’ and ‘comment’. But the way it presests ‘fact’ is stongly influenced by its ownership and its long history of supporting ‘middle’ England.

Rupert Murdoch has a similar agenda. This morning his serious Sunday paper had a different slant to today’s news. Here, I was going to quote from their poll of Labour chairman which showed them hugely in favour of Brown.

But it has disappeared from the web page.

Maybe Rupert has been making one of his telephone calls.

Times Online has many articles about the Labour leadership battle. Including one from heavy-weight columnist, Daniel Finkelstein, on why the leaked memo matters. And another story which suggests Brown is summoning his ministers to be back from their hols by September 1st.

The sum total of these articles is that The Times thinks there is a leadership crisis. And for Murdoch watchers like myself, Murdoch has not yet made up his mind what to do. So The Times reminds us that Ed Miliband, David’s brother is allegedly a Brownite.

So we should not trust The Times stable, nor the Mail stable.

So how about The Guardian. They were the newspaper which published the article by David Miliband last week, which created the media splurge today. They are owned by a trust but, since real life is never simple, they are managed by a highly successful commercial management. Today, they had a heavy weight article by Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer, which left this reader in no doubt that he thinks Brown is for the high jump. Whereas Michael White, one of The Guardian’s most respected political correspondents, was on the broadcast media, warning against the Labour Party pursuing a probably suicidal leadership battle.

This is just a sample of the press comment, and I have not included the broadcast media, but what they have reported fits in with the following analysis.

Nearly all the journalists reporting for the diversely owned media today treated this story seriously. Although we are in the ‘silly season’ of August, when the papers are supposedly full of stories about cats stuck in the roofs of churches, this story is not just about filling the gaps between the adverts.n

There is a crisis in the Labour leadership. And this needs reporting on, although most of the principal characters in the drama have gone on holiday. (But they are still reading their emails, reading the newspapers, watching the tele and talking to their colleagues.)

All of the journalists have to make a story out of what is happening. So much of what has been reported today is skewed to the journalistic convention of finding plots and fitting what is happening now, into the ‘story’ of the Blair/Brown rift, which has run throughout Labour’s rule since 1997.

Two points.

Miliband’s article for The Guardian last week, was not an orchestrated plot. Neither was Thatcher’s emergence as Labour Party leader, although some of her friends were right-wing plotters, wanting to vanish Edward Heath.

Second point. The split between the Blairites and Brownites, is yesterday’s story. Today new alliances are forming to meet today’s circumstances.

Milband is mostly characterised as a Blairite. Athough he is the son of a Marxist theorist, unlike Blair, who was the son of a Conservative. He is roughly the same generation as Blair, and like Blair went to Oxford. But he is totally different in personality. His political views are far closer to those espoused by Brown before he assumed power.

He is still a long way from proving that he can do better than Brown in reaching the hearts of the voters, be they Labour Party activists or Daily Mail middle England.

But because he has raised his head above the ramparts, while still holding his position as Foreign Secretary, he has made a difference. Brown should sack him. But I don’t think he will, because Miliband is voicing the thoughts of many Labour Party supporters.

And, my own view, is that he is doing so, because he is trustworthy politician. He may be ambitious, but I don’t think, that his current stance is all about personal ambition.

And, to return to the theme of this article, I don’t think Milband, and most of the other Labour Party politicians, are more, or less trustworthy, than the journalists, be they employed by The Guardian, the Mail or Rupert Murdoch.

The heavy-weight journalists and the politicians have similar skills, and the fact that some of them became journalists and some of them became politicians is an accident of their own personal biographies. At this point in my blog I was about to use William Rees Mogg, the editor of The Times for whom I worked in the the sixties and the seventies.

Mogg, because he is an honest journalist, has been outspoken about his own personal motivations. He has written about how he wanted to be a politician, but after failing to win a seat, realised that it becoming a journalist was a more realistic way of earning a living. I thought I had better check what he had to say about the Labour Party leadership before I wrote anything.

His latest article, in The Times of 28 July, had this headline.

Labour should choose Hillary, not Obama

If Gordon Brown goes, Harriet Harman should take over. Only a woman can change the climate of political debate

The headline makes Mogg seem like an out-of-touch idiot. As if he had not heard by 28th July that Hillary is now ancient history. If you follow the link and read his article, you will see that it is a reasoned argument for Labour to have the courage to support a female leader, namely Harriet Harman.

Although Mogg has been on the Murdoch payroll since shortly after he stepped down as Times editor after Lord Thomson sold The Times to Rupert Murdoch, this is clearly not an article written at the dictation of Rupert Murdoch.

It is vintage Mogg. Blending his powers of analysis with his private passions. And revealing his own personal voyage through life. His mother sent him to Charterhouse to be with the boys, and so learn to be a man. But William, when he was Times editor was prepared to go out on a limb and support women in public life (and rock stars like Mick Jagger).

So this article ends in a way I did not expect.

I asked the wrong question in my title. Perhaps because I am almost as old as Rees Mogg.

My thinking is steeped in the conflicts of the media as in Baldwin’s phrase, ‘power without responsibility’.

But the important question is where does the power lie with today’s media?

Is it with the newspaper groups who employ most of the world’s journalists, who actually write the stuff? And who earn their profits from old-fashioned print.

Or is it with the new media lot, like Google and WordPress?

Today, the old media is pouring shit on both Brown and Miliband. But both of them, as it happens, have been spending time and money trying to get their message over via the new meda.

Their efforts look amateurish. Unsurprsingly because the old media pay the mortgages of most of the experienced journalists.

But the old media is floundering. How long can the reputation of The Times survive, when Times Online puts up the kind of headlines they used today on Rees-Mogg’s effort?