Of course, remember that the Guardian was perfectly fine with the government harassing journalists as long as it was not them: http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/20/despite-its-battle-with-th...
It's fairly simple:
Journalists who break the law to bribe police and others for information, hack voicemails of private individuals, and intrude on the privacy of individuals should be punished. These things are not in the public interest, there is no excuse for doing them just to make money by publishing the (often prurient) details of someone's life.
Journalists who shed light on what the state is doing (even if that means publishing secret documents), if they can argue that is in the public interest, should not.
Of course there are some grey areas between the two, but the constrast of Murdoch's News organisation bribing policemen and the Guardian publishing stories based on top-secret documents from a whistleblower is an edifying one I think.
Most of the Leverson suggestions were about correcting a power imbalance between normal members of the public and the media/government elite. Making it easier for ordinary people to seek reparations from a newspaper is not 'government harassment'. Requiring papers to print retractions after being proven wrong in a court of law is hardly the same as the prime minister personally ordering the destruction of computers, confiscation of equipment and detention of journalists to prevent reporting about an issue.
That doesn't surprise me one bit.