The Telegraph’s chief political editor, Peter Oborne, has announced his resignation from the paper, declaring its latest coverage of the HSBC scandal as “a fraud on its readers.”
In a long and damning letter, Oborne, who also reports for Channel 4’s Dispatches and Unreported World, warns that newspapers allowing corporations to influence their content for readers for fear of losing advertising revenue could put democracy “in peril.”
Last week allegations were made against HSBC that its Swiss private bank had been helping wealthy clients evade tax.
While the majority of major national titles ran the story over several pages and for a number of days, The Telegraph reported nothing the following Monday, and very little on Tuesday and Wednesday.
According to Oborne, who joined The Telegraph in 2010, the Conservative-leaning paper’s reporting only “looked up” when the story turned into claims that there might be questions about the tax affairs of people connected to the Labour party.
“Telegraph readers are intelligent, sensible, well-informed people,” writes Oborne. “They buy the newspaper because they feel that they can trust it.
“If advertising priorities are allowed to determine editorial judgments, how can readers continue to feel this trust? The Telegraph’s recent coverage of HSBC amounts to a form of fraud on its readers. It has been placing what it perceives to be the interests of a major international bank above its duty to bring the news to Telegraph readers.”
Oborne said that it was a “most sinister development” and that The Telegraph would have been “contemptuous” if the BBC, so often the object of Telegraph attack, had done the same.
“A free press is essential to a healthy democracy,” said Oborne. “There is a purpose to journalism, and it is not just to entertain. It is not to pander to political power, big corporations and rich men. Newspapers have what amounts in the end to a constitutional duty to tell their readers the truth.”
In response, a Telegraph Spokesperson said: “Like any other business, we never comment on individual commercial relationships, but our policy is absolutely clear. We aim to provide all our commercial partners with a range of advertising solutions, but the distinction between advertising and our award-winning editorial operation has always been fundamental to our business. We utterly refute any allegation to the contrary.
“It is a matter of huge regret that Peter Oborne, for nearly five years a contributor to the Telegraph, should have launched such an astonishing and unfounded attack, full of inaccuracy and innuendo, on his own paper.”
Oborne’s full letter of resignation can be read here.
