The Guardian went undercover and filmed something the rest of the British press would rather you didn't dwell on: lobbyists from CT Group — the firm co-founded by Lynton Crosby, election whisperer to David Cameron and Boris Johnson — offering to pay a journalist to place "apparently independent" stories in national newspapers. * The tape is not subtle. A CT staffer lays out the menu like a waiter: "You can do it either way. We don't have to pay you, and you just go off and do how you normally do. Or, we can pay you, but we get more control over it." Then the price list: "£100 for every story that is successfully published (national or trade)." Five hundred quid to chair a roundtable. Journalism, but with a loyalty card. * And the product being sold wasn't fluff. The head of CT's real estate division wanted pieces suggesting the Building Safety Regulator — the watchdog created after Grenfell killed 72 people — was slowing down housebuilders. He offered to supply the "human case studies" himself. The reader would see an independent reporter's byline. The invoice would say otherwise. * Now here's our bit — the coverage of the coverage. This is a story about the pages of British national newspapers being quietly up for rent. So how did the rest of the British press cover it? * It mostly didn't. As of Thursday morning, we went looking for the story beyond the Guardian's own site and came back with echoes. Nothing we could find on the Daily Mail. Nothing on The Sun. The BBC's front page had room for airport drop-off fees. The outlets whose product — reader trust — was literally the thing being sold in that video had no news judgment to offer about it. * We get it. "Our industry's pages may contain undisclosed ads shaped like news" is an awkward headline to run next to your own news. But that's rather the point: the one story the press will reliably underplay is the one where the press is the product. The Guardian gets full marks here — undercover work, on-camera receipts, names named, including a Lib Dem activist with an OBE. * So enjoy the quiet, because it's informative. When a scandal implicates a politician, Fleet Street prints it at war-headline size. When it implicates the printing press, suddenly everyone's out at lunch.