No. No, I think we can safely say that it isn't. Sorry. But that got your attention, didn't it? And now that I've got it, let me play with it a while. Because - be honest - a small part of you really wants the headline to be true. It's the same part of you that watches natural disasters and urges the death toll higher. The part that wants to see News International dismantled, pulverised and incinerated, right down to the last cardboard packet of paperclips. The part that catches sight of Oedipus rushing distraught to the scene of his wife-mother's suicide and clamours DO IT DO IT DO IT doitdoitdoitdoit WWHEEEYY!!!

Now for the controversial bit: this ugly little smear in your psychological makeup is neither unnatural nor ignoble. In fact, it's essential. The do-it do-it do-it complex (DDDC) - not simple Schadenfreude, for it can be good as well as bad, but rather a kind of craving for extremity - is one of the few things that set us apart from the animals. Closely related to our capacity for boredom, it drives us to do all the bizarre and amazing and horrifying things that make us human. Things like firing rockets at the moon, eating 68 hot dogs in 10 minutes, and hacking into the answerphones of war widows.

Which brings us round to newspapers - but hold onto that thought about DDDC, as it'll come in handly later. Anyway: News Corp's decision on July 7th to shut down News of the World - cue the familiar cavalcade of statistics about its 168-year history, its 2.66m readers, etc etc - could well turn out to be journalism's Black Thursday. It was certainly shocking enough to prompt all sorts of melodramatic questions about the fabric of the newspaper business, chiefly these: "How did it get this bad?" and "Is this the end of tabloid journalism?"

So: how on earth did it get this bad, then? When and why did journalists begin to sanction the flagrant breach of privacy laws, bribery of the police and perversion of the course of justice? And when and why did the general public conceive such an irresistible anger against the press?

Truth is, there never was a golden age of journalistic conduct. The papers of the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries were characterised as much by unapologetic plagiarism as by a tendency to political bias so strong as to make the Daily Mail look moderate and inclusive.

The Victorian age scattered the lusty seeds of today's tabloids, as papers like News of the World and Reynolds's were accused of channelling "human sewage." Their reporters often sashayed down the fine line between "intrepid" and "ruthless." Exaggeration, distortion, fabrication and corruption have always gambolled at the heels of the popular press like artful beggar children.

But this hardly excuses the News of the World journalists implicated in the phone-hacking allegations. If the reports that are emerging are to be believed, they took the black magics of journalism's peripheral badlands and set them at the heart of their paper. Their sins are brute excess and crass insensitivity. They made an exception into a rule.

The damp squib that was the Guardian's revelations of malpractice in July 2009 seems to show that public opinion is more or less indifferent to a little chicanery. What ultimately swung the balanace against NoW was partly the emotional hammerblow of Glenn Mulcaire's intrusion into Milly Dowler's voicemail after her disappearance - the news broke serendipitously soon after Levi Bellfield's conviction - and partly the sheer volume of the accusations.

Why did the paper go so spectacularly wrong? Because of DDDC. Back in 1950, nearly two dedades before Rupert Murdoch bought the title, NoW had an average circulation of 8,441,000. Some days saw sales of more than 9 million copies. This is not to say that readers bought the paper because they trusted it - as TV news didn't really exist until the founding of ITN in 1955, the only alternative to the newspapers was the radio - but they clearly felt they had to know what was in it.

And what was in it? Well, substantially more foreign affairs coverage. Swathes of space were devoted to the order of ceremonies at Stalin's funeral in 1953, and the fledgeling IMF claimed the odd front page. For the most part, however, the paper lived up to its motto "All human life is there," and the celebrity peccadilloes and blood-scented criminal investigations would be very recognisable to the modern reader.

One crucial difference: time. A whole babbling host of factors, among them the rise of television as a serious rival, led to a gradual decline in sales over the next 60 years. There is nothing special about this - mutatis mutandis, it is the story of every established paper in Britain. But today competition, already cutthroat, has become eye-gouging.

And the subjects of the tabloids' stories, the drug-pushing sportsmen and the vicious oil magnates and the popstars and politicians, have learned their media savvy the hard way. In 21st-century Britain, there is not a district council or a third-division football club without its PR men and lawyers. And so, in order to satisfy the DDDC that had made the paper and its readership in a mobius-like symbiosis, NoW had to go to ever greater lengths.

It's easiest to think of the tabloid reporter as a drug dealer. In his superb book My Trade, the former Independent editor Andrew Marr remarks on the dual nature of the thing we call news. On the one hand, there are the stories of genuine importance, the Acts of Parliament that stretch our budgets and the Chinese droughts that distort our steel trade. On the other, there is a blind, groping, opiated addiction to the perpetual semblance of novelty. This second kind of news is not really news at all: it is what we already knew and feared repackaged and sold back to us at a premium. It is the recycling of our prejudices. It is not so much news as "olds."

The best stories, Marr continues, combine both kinds of news. These are the fulcra of public life whose movement nevertheless carries a visceral significance: 9/11, 7/7, Diana, general elections where the perfume of power is strong in the air. But events like these are few and far between, and in the meantime every paper has to fill some 20 pages of news on a daily basis. The drug must keep flowing - soma at any price. What to do when shocking headlines are in short supply? There are three options.

One: print boring stories and risk losing readers (the Daily Express option). Two: make up a good story or 13. The Sun has a wonderful facility for this, with triumphs ranging from the utterly baseless FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER in 1986 to 2011's allegation that X Factor judge Louis Walsh had touched up another man in a Dublin nightclub. Three: get real, first-rate scandals by illegal means.

Credit where credit is due: when it comes to accuracy, NoW had a far better record than its competitors, rivalling even some of the broadsheets. One thing its news desk has never done lightly is creative writing.

So in order to mine real gold from a dwindling seam, the paper resorted to journalistic TNT. Some of its methods were just about legal but morally dubious: star investigative reporter Mazher Mahmood, who boasts of having secured more than 250 criminal convictions, has used informants, surveillance devices and every costume in the pantomime dressing-up box to feed the DDC machine.

Other manoeuvres by the paper's staff appear to have heaped illegality upon illegality while doing less violence to the truth: Prince William really was booked in for knee surgery; Max Mosley really did indulge in what might uncharitably be described as a "SICK NAZI ORGY WITH FIVE HOOKERS."

As we have seen, however, NoW crossed a line. The problem now is the second question raised at the start of this article: has the British love affair with the gutter press just embarked upon a messy divorce? Is this THE END OF THE WORLD?

I don't think so. Two reasons. First, our ageing population is intensely conservative in its tastes. Newspapers fall over themselves to sell at jaw-droppingly low prices to students for a reason: the older a Briton gets, the more stuck in his ways he becomes. This is what keeps Spam afloat, the same cantankerous tenacity that took Last of the Summer Wine into its 31st series. It saved Yorkshire Tea, and it may well be what saves the tabloids.

But there is a deeper vitality to the red-tops. DDDC, the shame-faced pulsing pumping driving urge that is their lifeblood, is by no means exclusively a modern phenomenon. In fact, it is a crucial plot mechanism in much Western literature - particularly in Greek tragedy.

Outside a palace in Corinth, two slaves are in whispered conference. The howls and siren melodies of an age-old, implacable rage issue from within. Someone will die this day. The acrid attar of sexual jealousy and outraged pride sits thickly on your tongue like a mouthful of animal blood. And now Medea emerges.

A princess and priestess in her homeland, she betrayed her father for her lover and fled across the seas, dismembering her infant brother and scattering his shattered fragments in her ship's wake to slow the pursuit. She has given everything: but now she stands betrayed, ruined, helpless. Her husband has found a new bride, and she is to be exiled into the deadly wilderness. Her veins sing with vengeance.

But what can she do? In the distance, in the silence, one of her young sons starts whimpering. Ah. There's only one way to destroy a proud man. The children...

So it unfolds: pure tabloid material. Royalty, celebrity, sex, blood and a whiff of the exotic. Your emotional and intellectual reactions are cued before the drama, the real payload of the story hits and ahhh, doitdoitdoit OHMIGOD SHE'S DONE IT. She's actually killed her own children.

Of course I'm not arguing for a substantial correspondence between the Medea and a good tabloid splash - that would be fatuous beyond belief. For one thing, Euripides' sympathetic heroine would be no more than a "child-murdering lioness" in the morally certain world of the Sun or the Mail. There's no room for pity in a tabloid story; only fear.

Nevertheless, both Plato and Aristotle recognise the makings of DDDC in the audience at a tragedy. Plato believed that our intense emotional response to the events played out on stage changes us for good, while Aristotle's famous theory of catharsis is a close fit for the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God shock of a good news item.

So what? So quite a lot. Most contemporary Classics scholars believe that tragedy had an important role in fifth-century Athenian society. One school of thought holds that the tragic fall, the Aristotelian peripeteia, was a way of releasing the tensions between the individual and the city.

Let me explain, because this is important. When you sign up to an egalitarian society, you trade in what are called your "subjective freedoms" - basically, the freedom to do whatever the hell you please - for "objective freedoms," broad shared values like freedom of speech and freedom from tyranny.

But the two kinds of freedom are locked in perpetual conflict. And what Greek drama does is to show larger-than-life individuals chasing their subjective freedoms, with awful consequences. In the end, the values of the city usually prevail over the desires of the individual.

DDDC is crucial in this. The treacherous but irrepressible little part of you desperate to see Medea kill her children, to see paedophiles lynched in the streets, is what makes you glad you belong to a community and share its beliefs. You're happy just to be normal. When you've seen Raoul Moat run amok with a sawn-off shotgun - or when you've seen Oedipus plunge his wife's dress pins into his eye sockets - a tiny bit of you admires them, but most of you is thinking "Thank f**k that's not me."

What this boils down to is that sophisticated democratic societies need scandal stories: nothing brings us together like condemnation and jealousy. We just happen to prefer our myths to be "true." There will always be a market - no, a deep-rooted cultural need - for people to supply these stories.

NoW has fallen into one of its own horrifying front-page splashes - and Britain's unanimous, sanctimonious fury at the paper only goes to show how much we crave these tales from the tabs. As James Murdoch raises the axe for another savage blow, all together now: DO IT - DO IT - DO IT!