I may have created the impression the other day that I think Robert Peston is a tosser. This wasn’t my intention at all because, notwithstanding his numerous presentational faux pas, I actually deeply admire his ability to get up the noses of the Daily Mail (“Does this man have too much power?”), various bloggers and, no doubt, city traders.
As the graph here shows, the number of web searches for RP has shot up in the last month. But the reviews haven’t been entirely favourable.
Guido Fawkes, quoting the FT, thinks he should just shut up on the basis that his queerly-intoned outpourings are helping to bring about the destruction of the world’s financial system. Others seem to agree.
The root of the complaint is that Peston put out a story on his blog an hour before the FTSE opened yesterday about various banks approaching the Treasury for a cash injection which, it’s fair to assume, helped lead to a 40% fall the share price of the Royal Bank of Scotland and big falls among other banks by close of trading last night.
Peston’s blog post said:
…last night [Monday] a trio of the UK’s biggest banks – Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, and Lloyds TSB – signalled to Alistair Darling that they’d like to see the colour of taxpayers’ money rather quicker than he might have expected… Current rough estimates are that the capital injection could be as much as £50bn in total for all British banks.
But according to Guido Fawkes yesterday:
There is real anger in the City because of his reporting… Peston has single-handedly inflamed the situation.
Well boo-hoo. You’ll notice that by some miraculous coincidence, all the banks named by Peston have been part-nationalised to the tune of £50bn this very day. Thus Peston’s story is, um, essentially right. In fact, the only reason the markets reacted as they did is because he’s always right – but I guess the truth hurts when your million-pound bonus has gone down the plughole.
Admittedly, his tendency to use the phrase “I have learned…” is deeply tedious but in the wider scheme of things, shouldn’t we be celebrating this man’s talent as a journalist, rather than calling for him to be fired or, quite possibly, killed?
The Conversation {1 comments}
Tricky one, though, isn’t it. However skilled Peston is at sourcing gossip I’m not sure it’s helpful to have business correspondents essentially speculating about the likelihood of banks going under, given how fragile our entire economic system is at present.
That said I don’t agree with some kind of gentleman’s code among the media to turn a blind eye to events for some supposed greater good.
I suppose what I’m really saying here is, I need to actually get on with some work.
Leave Your Own Comment
You can follow any responses to this entry via its RSS comments feed. You can also leave a trackback if you want.