Lying about people; obtaining information under false pretences; spreading racism and hatred of disabled people; bribery and corruption; encouraging breaches of professional confidentiality (I was once pressed by a tabloid newspaper to break professional confidentiality in a case where there was no public interest involved except providing a 'human interest story' - I'm glad to say I refused); general all-round dishonesty.
I daresay most of these things are indeed illegal already, but no one is really enforcing it. And yes, I don't have full confidence in the competence of any regulatory body, but I don't think that's an excuse for complete lack of regulation.
As regards the 'freedom of the press' argument: Given that much of the press is not free anyway in the true sense but is run by rich, unaccountable individuals or corporations, I'm afraid this strikes me as having parallels with the arguments that if you have any regulation of corporations' rights to exploit their workers and pollute the environment, this will lead to something like Stalinism, or at least to the red-tape strangulation of small family businesses; or the decision by the American Supreme Court that corporations are 'people' and should have a First Amendment right to donate as much as they wish to political campaigns. Of course, some forms of regulation would be authoritarian or lead to extreme bureaucratic restrictions on small presses or individual writers - but there can be common-sense ways of increasing the accountability of powerful corporations without running roughshod over small independent presses, for example.
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