Robert Peston Fights Treasury Committee With Quality Journalism, Endless Vowels

Robert Peston, journalist extraordinaire and credit-crunch hunk o’ burnin’ love, met the Treasury Select Committee to answer questions over allegations he damaged the financial markets by merely reporting what was going on.

Peston was blamed for the queues outside Northern Rock after he revealed the bank’s woes to the nation, as well as for the rise in HBOS’s share price after Peston revealed they were going to be taken over by Lloyds. More specifically, he was accused of being a pawn in some insider trading scam, with a mole feeding him information that would affect the markets. It was an accusation that George Osbourne ratified and then Peston, with typical aplomb, deflected with the Deripaska-Rothschild-Osbourne yacht scoop, while the FT defended Pesto to the hilt.

Still, the criticisms haven’t gone away. “Newspapers have the same sort of obligation as they do during a war”, said Simon Jenkins on the media’s role in the crisis, i.e. shut up and not “scare” people. Jenkins of course chose instead, on the day of the worst stock market fall in years, to romp up Cader Idris and uncork his babbling, Biblical prose. How responsible of him!

So Peston faced the committee yesterday, and he rebuffed the criticisms in a hyper-Pestonian manner. This was Pesto off the leash, allowed to roam free over vowels and clauses, a style described politely as “loquacious” by the Guardian and perhaps more accurately as having “sentences like giant sausages” by Quentin Letts in the Mail. “I know lots and lots and lots of people, including you, and, y’know, I talk to lots and lots and lots of people”, was his version of refusing to outline his sources. Slick.

The main thing is that Northern Rock was screwed even if Peston did create a run on it, something that the other journos at the hearing all concurred with. Jenkins’s wider notion of not reporting financial stories to maintain market stability is flawed too, as transparency moves to the front of the agenda. Jenkins, for his part, kept pretty quiet at the meetings, only piping up to tell the assembled committee kettles that they were black: ”By an extraordinary coincidence you have all five journalists here who predicted the credit crunch. What have you been doing all the time?” Well, at least they haven’t been telling people to “invest in sanity” and buy “shares in kindness, with a side bet on courtesy and brotherly love”. If only we’d just given Fred The Shred a nice big hug, then none of this horridness would have happened!

Peston, meanwhile, nailed the whole conundrum when he says that impact upon share price is “peripheral” to the provision of information to the masses. That’s what journalism is – can you remember that far back, Jenkins?

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Hot Money | February 5, 2009 3:06PM |