The wonder is that Nick Davies kept digging for answers once confronted by the monstrous symbiotic relationship between the News of the World tabloid newspaper and its readers.
The investigative journalist, working for The Guardian newspaper, spent more than six years unravelling and exposing corruption among the United Kingdom's power elite, epitomised by the cover-up of mass hacking of people's phones by News of the World reporters.
During his painstaking research, Davies got to see the mutually parasitic bond between the red-top tabloid and its more than 3.5 million readers.
''Take one week early in 2005,'' Davies writes in the first couple of chapters of his book about the affair, Hack Attack: How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch, published last year.
''The [newspaper's] internal messages record that a male prostitute had contacted them to report 'romping' in a sauna with a male TV presenter - 'He wants to do a kiss-and-tell and says his mate can corroborate the tale'. And a woman who went out with a Hollywood actor when he was 14 wants to sell the story of how he cheated on her ...'
''As the weeks go by, the messages disclose an apparently endless line of men and women who have collected some fragment of human interest and are now offering it for sale ... A prison worker reckons he can prove that an old heroin addict in one of his cells is the secret father of a singer in a girl band ... A man is currently having a relationship with a woman whose brother is a notorious criminal. They have been together for seven months, he says. They are still together. No matter: he's selling her. 'Would you be interested? Cos I have a lot to say!' ... Everything is for sale. Nothing is exempt.''
The complicity of the public in generating and then consuming endless servings of salacious or painfully intimate details of people's lives is astounding.
It is surprising Davies did not decide that expending energy on their behalf, to uncover the full extent of what was going on, was not worth the effort.
Why did he not flag it away?
That is the first question during a recent early morning (mid-evening UK-time) phone conversation with Davies who lives in deepest Sussex, southeast England.
The 62-year-old is now The Guardian's global feature writer, charged with producing ''powerful human stories that tell you something about the world''.
He admits his day has been spent in his study struggling to turn a trip to South Africa a few weeks ago in to a story encapsulating what has happened to the rainbow nation since the end of apartheid.
''You're right,'' he says, turning his attention to the world of trashy tabloids, phone hacking and systemic cover-ups in which he immersed himself for so long.
''The bulk of the population reads those newspapers.''
But the majority of people in the UK also support greater ethical restrictions on those same newspapers, he says.
''It's kind of difficult to unpick it.
''But [to answer] the underlying question. Journalists aren't employed to please the public or even their readers. The job is to try, somehow or other, to dig out the truth about important things.''
It is all about the truth.
That was certainly the object in writing an earlier book, Flat Earth News, which examined falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the media.
A 2008 interview on BBC radio after that book was published triggered a call from an anonymous ''Mr Apollo'' who offered to take him deeper down the rabbit hole.
If Mr Apollo had not made contact, it is unlikely Davies would have been a key figure in eventually exposing the scandal, he says.
That phone call was the beginning of several years' slow, meticulous, setback-ridden investigation, bringing to light the rot in News of the World and other UK newspapers.
What emerged was a Fourth Estate largely consumed by a race to the bottom of the ethics barrel as it pursued readers and profits at all costs.
• Phone hacking summed it all up: the illegal practice of accessing people's personal voicemail, often with the help of private investigators, in order to be the first to get the dirt.
The thousands of victims included British royal Prince William, actors Hugh Grant, Sienna Miller and Gwenyth Paltrow, politicians Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, singers Mick Jagger and Robbie Williams, sportsmen David Beckham and Kieren Fallon, the family of missing girl Madeleine McCann and murdered teenager Milly Dowler.
The practice took root in the Sun, a UK tabloid owned by News Corp international media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
The paper's long-term editor Kelvin MacKenzie had complied with his employer's desire to push boundaries.
He ''effectively took the book of journalistic rules and flushed it down one of the office's famously horrible toilets'', Davies wrote.
''MacKenzie's world ran on very simple lines: anything goes, nobody cares, nothing can stop us now.''
In the 1990s, the Friday tradition for some Sun journalists was getting £300 from the newspaper cashier, buying cocaine and getting ''coked out of their heads'' to start the weekend.
Davies' work to uncover and then prove the phone hacking was aided by some and thwarted by others.
Some at Scotland Yard tried to obscure their own ineptitude or complicity.
Many politicians were too scared of the power of the media, especially Murdoch's empire, too beholden to its favours, or too gagged by the secrets it knew, to act against it.
News Corp denied all knowledge or sacrificed small players to keep a lid on things.
The fallout, when the top did finally blow off in 2011 and 2012, saw resignations, prison terms, careers ended, the closing of the 168-year-old News of the World, and a public inquiry by Lord Justice Leveson into the practices of the British press.
The story is outrageous, full of intrigue and globally significant, perfect fodder for a film. George Clooney wants to direct a movie based on Davies' book.
He has commissioned award-winning New Zealand writer Anthony McCarten to work on a script.
It is a dislike of bullies that equipped Davies to succeed where many others would have given up a long time ago.
''A lot of people who do this rather obsessive investigative work turn out to be driven by things in their private life,'' he says.
''When I and my siblings were little we got hit a lot. It has different effects on different people. For me, I just really, really don't like people abusing power.''
Anxiety and imagination were extremely useful: the anxious desire to find the facts and get the true story, guided by the ability to conceive of what might lie just beyond the line of sight waiting to be uncovered.
The Guardian gave Davies a long leash and a lot of time to investigate.
It was critical to his success.
''The commercial pressure on newspapers matters because it isn't just that journalists are losing their jobs; the important thing is that news organisations are losing the capacity to tell the truth,'' he says with conviction.
''We are in danger of being reduced to recycling unchecked secondhand material from news agencies and PR sources. That is fantastically dangerous.
''It is the biggest problem facing journalism throughout the world. The internet has broken our business model.
''Unless we find a new source of funding, the quality of the work we can produce will carry on declining.''
The truth is of fundamental importance, Davies says.
Uncovering it is the purpose journalism serves.
''As individuals we can't establish the truth about all sorts of things where the truth is important to us. We need people who can do it for us.
''If ... the final impact of the internet on our profession is to kill us off, then some future generation would say, 'You know what, we should have a bunch of people, and we should give them some money and some skills, and tell them, your job is to go out and find out what is true and what is false.
''In other words, if we didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent us.''
Davies, however, has no illusions about the limitations of journalism.
The fact is, he says, that despite more than 100 articles on the phone hacking, and a book pulling it all together in one account, nothing really has changed.
''The Leveson Report on media regulation has been more or less strangled by the bad guys in Fleet St.
''And nothing has changed in the structures of power. At this moment we are building up to a general election in the UK on May 7.
"And we are seeing Murdoch's newspapers, and some of the others, throwing their weight around in a way that is just as appalling as ever. Nothing has changed at all.''
The book and the interview look like they are both headed for the same depressing conclusion.
The epilogue of Hack Attack is an erudite and passionate condemnation of neoliberalism and its negative impacts on the media and society.
''When you allow global corporations to roam global markets, you make them more powerful than nation states . . . The simple beautiful idea that people should run their own societies disintegrates, allowing the few to rule and the many to follow,'' he writes bleakly.
The same theme is being repeated in many quarters, he says.
''More and more books, more and more analysis, leads back to this fundamental point, that we've introduced an economic system that is fantastically destructive.''
For a moment, it appears Davies' talk about serving the truth is him consoling himself with the thought that he has done all that could be expected.
''There is a limit to the power a journalist has,'' he says. That seems to clinch it. But he does not stop there, and everything is thrown in to a different light.
''We can put words into the public domain and people react. Then it is up to the people where that reaction goes.''
It is not just about serving truth. It is about serving people through truth-telling.
What will it take to fundamentally change the global power equation?''It's not something I can do by writing,'' he says.
''Revolution, I guess.''
Davies has turned his book, and this conversation, into an invitation to act.
So what sort of shape is New Zealand's media landscape in? Commentator Russell Brown offers his opinion.
New Zealand's media environment is quite different from that of Britain, but Auckland Mayor Len Brown may feel he has experienced something akin to the tactics used in that country, Russell Brown says.
''The original story on his affair had clear political motivations and was designed to do him reputational damage.
''The treatment of the source in that story was also despicable and unethical.
''But, as The New Zealand Herald subsequently demonstrated, there were public interest elements in it. And no-one listened to his voicemails.''
The British press is far more partisan and competitive than New Zealand's, Brown says.
''And although celebrity has become a more prominent feature in news reporting here, we don't have anything like the kind of Faustian pact that people make for fame in Britain.
''We've seen intimations of British celebrity culture in recent years. And it could be said that the likes of Charlotte Dawson was built up and broken down by elements of our news media.''
In theory, phone hacking could happen here.
''If people aren't changing the default PIN when they set up their voicemail services ... [Phone companies] certainly strongly instruct users to change their PIN.''
Mr Brown has not heard of any cases of bribing New Zealand police.
''The fact that there simply isn't the money to do something like this is probably our major protection.''
We also do not have Britain's nearly century-old culture of press barons.
''Even when [Australian American business magnate Rupert] Murdoch had a 49% stake in INL, it didn't seem that he used his influence to direct editorial priorities ... That said, there were a few shivers at The New Zealand Herald when Murdoch took a stake in APN recently,'' he says.
APN's assets include New Zealand newspaper and radio business NZME, which publishes The New Zealand Herald.
What we should worry about is the political direction of news agendas, Mr Brown believes.
''One thing that emerged very clearly from [Nicky Hager's book] Dirty Politics is the way that many reporters were using - directly or indirectly - the Prime Minister's Office as an unattributed source for news stories.
''We've seen the Official Information Act gamed more than once for political purposes.
''Jason Ede's access to Labour Party computers may or may not have been a criminal offence, but it might be the closest we've had to a phone-hacking-style incident.''
At the festival
• Nick Davies is a guest speaker during next month's Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival. Davies and Radio New Zealand's Carol Hirschfeld will explore questions of media impartiality and manipulation in a one-hour session on Saturday, May 9, at 6.30pm, in the Regent Theatre, Dunedin.
• Lightning Talks, Saturday May 9, 11.30am-12.30pm Regent Theatre.
