This week's version of "the tabloids have gone too far this time" comes complete with a quietly alluring radio dimension, one that reminds us of the degree to which "tabloidisation" is a multimedia phenomenon.
Kara Noble - the photoseller whose ironic name would surely be chucked out by any editor if a novelist invented it for such a treacherous character - was one of the hosts on something called the "Heart 106.2 Morning Crew". Is this a mere coincidence?
Well, it is, obviously. But it's a telling coincidence, particularly when we hear the bizarre footnote: this London commercial station was actually hoping to buy the "Sophie Topless" photograph itself, in the alleged interest of preventing its publication.
This column is not in the business of adding to the acres of newsprint devoted to these idiotic shenanigans. The point about this silly story, however, is the common bond it delineates between the Sun and tabloid-type radio: blood brothers, their sordidness is matched only by their banality.
Maybe it's hard on Heart FM to throw around such words when its emissions don't reach these shores and we can't judge it on its daily merits. You don't have to try terribly hard, though, to imagine the antics of its imaginatively titled Morning Crew. The MC is a programme format that stretches around the English-speaking world in mind-numbing similarity, with its team of presenters trading barbed comments, sexual innuendo and tidbits lifted from the tabloid press, as well as treating listeners to competitions and top-40 tunes.
As well as being dependent on the tabloids, these shows share their role as fuel for the ceaseless engine of celebrity. Indeed, page one of the Star, with its hopelessly Irish emphasis on actual news, is less likely to set off a chat on the Dublin morning shows than some gossip from its British counterparts.
It's just as well: in a small country like ours, the occasional viciousness required by the format is best reserved for overseas celebs; even the Terry Keane story fetches a restrained reaction from the MCs, being uncomfortably close to home.
International celebrities - Hollywood stars, pop singers, supermodels - are the common language of the MCs; wherever you go in the world you can probably hear the same names being bandied about.
This is a realm where, on Thursday, one of the 98FM Morning Crew hosts (in the course of taking quiz questions by phone from listeners) had no bother naming the advertising "face" of Maybelline make-up - but was stumped when asked to "name the Shakespearean play that features characters called Cordelia, Goneril and Regan". (He took a guess at Hamlet.)
When the breakfast menu on commercial radio is this dumb, trite and boring, it seems terribly churlish to stick a "tabloid" label on RTE Radio 1 just because of its occasional descent into gossip, scandal and sex-obsession.
On Wednesday, while the MCs were still tittering over Sophie, you could switch over and hear, on Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Fri- day), an intelligent, informed discussion of "the right to die", including an interview with the doctor involved in the case of Hillsborough victim Tony Bland. In fact, the discussion went on to include two more doctors, and could be criticised for being excessively abstract, for over-reliance on "expertise" at the expense of human interest. That wouldn't be fair, though: first, because - loath as I am to admit it - doctors are human too; and second, because solid programmes like this can take a long view, can regard this discussion as a responsible starting point for an extended "conversation" that will look at the issue from other angles.
It's tricky, in a wider media environment that is coming to regard "tabloid" and "boring" as opposites, rather than - as is often the case - synonyms.
NOW, just to make it easier for the MCs to slot this column in their "boring" file: I heard a lovely little programme about native Americans on BBC Radio 4 this week. God help us, From the Bad- lands and Beyond (BBC Radio 4, Wednesday) was even read by a Canadian. In this second part of a four-part series, writer Gail Robinson, in a Saskatchewan accent flatter than the prairies, told us how she hopped in her pick-up and drove for two days - through the lifeless soya fields known by the native Americans as "green concrete" - after an invite from her friend Don on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
Pine Ridge is the site of what the BBC continuity announcer referred to as "the Battle of Wounded Knee" in 1889, but Robinson stuck to the more accurate term, "massacre". It's not such remote history: Don's father, only a small child at the time, survived Wounded Knee by leaping into thorny bushes that left him scarred for life, but alive (his parents were not so lucky).
Now the Wounded Knee graves are festooned with the upside-down US flag favoured by the militant American Indian Movement. "I fought for that flag, right-side up," Don tells Gail. After the second World War Don married and stayed in Scotland, "where I was just another foreigner".
Robinson is a beautiful writer given to flowery language, but there is nothing remotely romantic about the picture she paints of reservation life, hopeless and riddled with abuse of alcohol and an extremely nasty-sounding array of drugs.
"I've seen worse poverty in Britain," Don says. "It's not the `not having', it's the unhappiness."