I know there’s a lot of snow in London at the moment, but yesterday it seemed as if some people had stumbled their way through the back of the wardrobe and found their way into Narnia!

Enter five journalists; Robert Peston, Jeff Randall, Alex Brummer, Simon Jenkins and Lionel Barber brought up in front of the Treasury Select Committee for, would you believe it, a grilling regarding their part in the downfall of Northern Rock and the Credit Crunch!

Questions centred primarily on their responsiblity as professional business journalists and whether or not they should think first before publishing or at least delay breaking a story for a while! Utter rubbish.

Peston was asked the rather foolish but direct question,

“Were you responsible for the run on Northern Rock?”. 

His answer after a brief crowd-pleasing pause was

“Given it a lot of thought, and no!”  

Firstly, the MPs accuse the journalists of “over-reporting” and then in a dazzling turn-around towards the end of the interrogation, change their mind and the journalists are accused of not publishing enough about the crisis.  Sorry but you can’t have it both ways!  Either way it is now extremely difficult to hide the truth from the public these days even in an industry which is fairly impenetrable by outsiders.

Aspersions are also cast on the journalists’ so-called shady sources.  The journalists counter this by saying that they have multiple sources and cross-check their sources stories to ensure accuracy of reporting. I suspect that several of these sources are likely to be MPs, perhaps even, heaven forbid,
members of the Treasury Select Committee!

Peston fought back against the MPs saying,

“It was fairly clear that the Government, knowing it was about to acquire large chunks of these banks were, I sense, using the press to force down the share price.”

Really? It had never crossed my mind!  

Just for good measure the subject of media regulation popped up again.  This was an easy ball for the journalists to catch with their repost along the lines of - well actually this is a catastrophic failure of the banking system that we’re talking about.

To end with, in a rather farcical fashion, the journos were asked what they thought would happen in the future.  Perhaps the MPs were hoping to get some tips and try some short-selling for themselves but no such luck.

I also caught a few brief minutes of Jeremy Paxman interviewing some economics bod (sorry didn’t catch his name as it flashed on the screen) on Newsnight about the discussion between the journalists and the Select Committee.  He seemed to think that the journalists (although obviously being fine upstanding members of the community and great reporters) were attributable for at least some of the blame.

When asked what Peston could possibly benefit by bringing down major financial institutions through his spot on the BBC and his infamous blog, the economist replied,

“Fame!”

I rest my case!

Tags: news, the economy

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 9:27 am and is filed under news, the economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.