It would be interesting to see if people were angry enough about this to cancel their Sky subs. Do most people realise the Screws and Sky are both Murdoch?
I'm not defending journalists at all - the people who wrote the stories, the news editors and up through the management chain who knew what was going on - but this is the result of using private investigators instead of (or as well as) journalists. Different methods. Of course anyone with a grain of humanity should have seen how appallingly wrong this was, but it wasn't actually considered illegal to listen to someone else's phone messages at the time - that's only been established quite recently (when the phone hacking story was being closely ring-fenced to the royal reporter, the CPS originally said it was only illegal 'if the person concerned hasn't already listened to the message' which is a weird idea and smells awfully of being terribly helpful to Mr Murdoch.
Also the result of intense competition within and between red-top news rooms, where there is massive pressure to use any tactics, fair or foul, to get the story and to angle the story in a way that suits the agenda of that paper. I know reporters on tabloids who are not, for example, extreme pro-lifers, but file stories that are designed to that agenda because that's what their editor and news editor want.
Btw, some of us journalists are human beings who would never dream of using tactics like this. There are lots of journalists legitimately on MN and have been from the off, who are just normal posters who chat just like anyone else.