BBC's Peston deserves credit, not blame, for his reporting of crunch

Roy Greenslade
15 Oct 2008

During a coffee break at a conference a couple of weeks ago, a senior BBC executive spent some time trying to explain to a group of us the phenomenon that is Robert Peston. He is not a natural broadcaster, she began. He lays stress on the wrong syllables. He is acutely prone to inappropriate pauses in mid-sentence. He leaves odd words hanging in the air. At times, he uses a portentous tone to convey completely banal information, like a primary school teacher talking down to her class.

Yet, she said, as some people started to interrupt on Peston's behalf, he is a wonderful communicator. Despite his lack of polished broadcasting skills and, more likely because of them, he manages to get his message across with considerable charm.

I think that assessment was spot on. The BBC's business editor appeals to the public because he has, to coin a phrase, an unnatural naturalness. In some ways, he reminds me of the BBC's former political editor, John Cole. He was anything but a smooth performer in front of the camera, but it didn't seem to matter. He made us listen.

Anyway, Peston has improved his delivery. When he started out, I found him so embarrassing I had to look away, and that hasn't been the case for at least a year. Peston's verbal tics aside, there are much more fundamental criticisms of his journalism. First, that he has by virtue of his new eminence the power to bring down banks. Second, that his desire for scoops runs counter to the BBC ethos. Third, that he is too close to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, implying that it colours his analysis.

As I said during a World Service debate last week when debating the supposed "bad influence" of the media in reporting the global financial crisis, we journalists are the messengers not the message.

When dealing with this matter, as with so many others, we are damned if we do and damned if we don't. It is a constant journalistic dilemma, which Peston and his BBC news bosses understand. Like all journalists, they also know that sitting on information is a far greater sin in almost all cases than releasing it into the public domain. Peston's job as a reporter, especially one employed by a public service broadcaster, is to disclose what he knows. The fact that he knows before anyone else will inevitably lead to a journalistic checklist before he broadcasts.

Primarily, he must be assured that the story is genuine. After that he will have to take into account whether his sources may have ulterior motives for leaking the information to him. That may well stay his hand for a little while. Then comes the rather important aspect of the likely effects of disclosure. As a financial journalist of long standing, he is well aware of the likely consequences of stories that move markets or, in the Northern Rock instance, spur a possible run on a bank.

At that point, he will have two considerations in mind. Will the story come out from another source to another part of the media anyway? Will spiking the story be against the overall public interest?

In my view, Peston has behaved impeccably in his presentation of his stories on air, supplementing what he broadcasts with lengthy, informal blog postings that usually add a lot more detail. His blog explanation yesterday about the reasons the Royal Bank of Scotland might not be nationalised was illuminating. It certainly contradicted his assertion on his blog the previous day that taxpayers would end up owning 60% of RBS, proof that the story is moving fast and he is, like everyone else, running fast to catch up.

Critics who suggest that Peston alone is able to influence events should also be aware that BBC news output is a team sport. Peston may appear to be speaking off the cuff when the 10 O'Clock News anchor puts a question to him during the bulletin, but insiders know that both question and answer have been agreed and loosely scripted beforehand.

Though he has been accused of going it alone by broadcasting from home and writing his blog entries, he is not a maverick. Nothing that Peston broadcasts comes as a surprise to his newsroom superiors. So this is not a case of a single man exercising journalistic power with impunity.

He may be the reporter chosen by certain members of the financial and political establishment to receive exclusive information, but he will discuss that with editors before he steps in front of the camera or microphone.

That takes us, of course, to this business about his closeness to No.10. He wrote a biography of the Prime Minister, Brown's Britain, which is considered to be somewhat flattering. Whether this has given him a hotline to Gordon Brown is less clear, though at least one major scoop that bank chiefs were seeking capital from the Government in talks with the Chancellor and the Governor of the Bank of England probably emanated from within the Treasury.

The result was a collapse in share values for the Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays. It is doubtful whether this was viewed as helpful to the Government.

Peston also has good City contacts, and much is made of his friendship with Roland Rudd, a former colleague at the Financial Times who founded communications agency Finsbury and represents Lloyds TSB. So what?

The cultivation of contacts by journalists is essential. It's what we do. Journalists nowadays spend too much time trying to find out how their rivals obtain stories rather than discovering their own scoops. It's part of the media narcissism that, even if interesting to us insiders, has no resonance with the public.