Frontline Club Debate: MPs caught by double whammy of US and UK journalism

It was only when I got home from the Frontline Club debate on MPs' expenses (see posting below) and looked at my pictures that I realised Heather Brooke was sitting under a poster of a nuclear explosion.
Quite an apt metaphor for what she and the Telegraph have done to our political system via their work on exposing MPs' expenses.
Brooke contrasted journalism in the US (where she trained) with that of the UK. She said in the US journalists trawled through public records to get information while in the UK they tended to rely on leaks and payments.
There was some criticism from the Frontline audience of the Telegraph for allegedly paying (according to Roy Greenslade £75,000) for the expenses' data.
But it seems to me that MPs have only themselves to blame. As Brooke said last night they obstructed her at every turn and delayed and delayed putting their expenses into the public domain.
Because of that they lost control of the story and got terrible PR when they tried to exempt themselves from FoI legislation they had passed.
Brooke said MPs are still busy "redacting" (i.e. censoring) the expenses information which is finally due to be published next month.
Daily Telegraph assistant editor Andrew Pierce claimed the redacting process would have meant the stories about MPs flipping their second homes and having phantom mortgages would never have emerged.
That is the greatest justification of the Telegraph's actions and is overwhelmingly in the public interest.
It seems MPs have been caught by two methods of journalism: the painstaking five years of legal action by Heather Brooke which led the MPs data having to be prepared for public release and a good old fashioned Fleet Street scoop by the Telegraph in getting hold of the data and using it superbly.
Pic Jon Slattery