Ed Miliband argued it was “a matter of honour and the promises we made” as he argued unsuccessfully for parliament to launch phase two of the Leveson inquiry into press intrusion. For Sir Cliff Richard, the BBC hovering over his home in a helicopter was a “very serious invasion of privacy”, during an investigation that led to no charges. For Kay Kimsong, the editor of the Phnom Penh Post, it was the coverage of his own newspaper’s sale to a public-relations executive with close ties to the government, that cost him his job.

How we arbitrate the rights and responsibilities of maintaining a free and fair press function is one of the defining political issues of our age, and we seem to be inadequately prepared for the task.

The price of a free press is paid by both those who are wronged and exposed, and by those who are seeking to expose abuses of power and instances of corruption. Outside the shrinking model of western-style democracies, the people who pay most, usually with their freedom and lives, are reporters and editors working against corruption and the abuse of power. When fragile democracies fall, it is often journalists who are the first dominoes to be pushed.

The examples are endless, and moving ever closer to home: journalists at the Philippine news site Rappler, who receive sometimes as many as 800 death threats an hour from President Rodrigo Duterte’s online band of fanatical trolls; two Reuters journalists who were imprisoned in Myanmar for filming atrocities against the Rohingya Muslims; the 10 journalists killed in Kabul in a suicide bombing at the end of April; the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed by a car bomb for digging into stories about corruption in the Maltese government; the Russian journalist Maxim Borodin investigating mercenary deaths in Syria, who died after a fall from his apartment.

Last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, there were 262 journalists imprisoned, the highest number for 30 years. Since 1990, more than 2,500 have been killed, in civil wars, covering conflict or investigating regimes and individuals of corruption.

Squaring this level of personal sacrifice with the actions of empowered and corrupt journalism in more protected environments, leaves not only a bad taste but an open door for intervention. This might come from governments or, more likely and equally worryingly, from the new information gatekeepers, such as social media companies and search engines, who, through their practices and terms of use, are already exercising an opaque control over journalism.

Press freedom is still argued for and arbitrated on a set of assumptions that are rapidly becoming outdated. The assumption that there will always be a well-funded commercial press is already shattered. Even where news companies are beating market expectations, as News Corp, Thomson Reuters and Gannett all did last week, the overall revenues accruing to news divisions are smaller than in the past and, in some sectors such as local journalism, all but gone. The assumption that there is something easily defined as “the press” is as anachronistic as the printing presses from which it came.

While arguably it has never been more important to be able to identify and defend good journalism, the most successful commercial distributors of information – Facebook and Google – have built systems that pay little attention to defining different categories of information. The most difficult and dangerous assumption to tackle within this, is that anything which appears to be journalism ought to be defended as such. The failure of the “marketplace of ideas” in the US has led to an unregulated landscape in which reporting is relying on personal donation or subscription and foundation support. But when everything is speech, and protected by the first amendment, the likelihood increases that voices are drowned out or distorted by those with greater resources, better tactics or worse motives.

The results of this folly are being played out in every market in the world, on Capitol Hill and in select committee hearings. The release by Facebook of thousands of Russian-authored ads targeted at US voters in the 2016 election last week underlined the problem, as propagandists in St Petersburg mimicked activists, publishers and citizens across the American political spectrum with absurd ease.

Open Democracy recently reported that the Irish referendum on abortion was being subjected to the same tactics, with overseas groups able to buy and target Irish voters in the same way. Regulations to stop campaign spending by overseas parties did not anticipate this sort of interference through social media, despite the fact it is the first tactic in any lobbying groups armoury.

Online news properties, which look perfectly normal, are often part of sophisticated political influence campaigns, but it is becoming harder to prove the funding and authorship.

In Britain, the charged issue of press regulation grows from a perception that the bad journalism outweighs the good. That the largest and richest denizens of the press have historically been as corrupt as the power they were meant to be holding to account, and often more powerful, too.

The relationship between Rupert Murdoch’s News UK executives and David Cameron’s Conservative party was scandalously close and provided the right conditions for the phone-hacking scandal to flourish.

The inability of the UK professional press to effectively self-regulate has arisen from the fact that the largest commercial constituents in the UK have been historically the most egregious in terms of practice, and moribund in terms of moral authority.

A moment where everything is broken at least offers some hope that we can do better. The first step to this will be an understanding that no one part of the equation can be tackled discretely.

Press freedom is a sacrosanct article of the democratic process and, even at its most abusive, it remains better than the alternative. But we have to understand just how much worse those abuses can potentially become. As journalists, we also have to recognise that our future is more in our own hands, and those of our paymasters and owners, than our narrative sometimes suggests.

Advocating for strong journalistic protections means agreeing that there are principles that identify good practice, just as there are in medicine and law, and that there are consequences for transgression. If we cannot define and recognise these principles, then it will be difficult to resist government or commercial efforts to define them for us. And for the grandest institutions, such as parliament and the BBC, there is an historic role in redefining not only what the rights of the press might be, but also what the rights of the citizenry are to have access to and receive reliable information.