The Daily Telegraph: guilty as charged?

From a ‘cash for access’ sting, to some deeply unsavoury reporting, a lot has happened in the world of journalism over the last week, but we’re still none the wiser as to why the Daily Telegraph’s HSBC coverage was so pathetic. By Raymond Snoddy.

The Daily Telegraph did something this week to help restore its tarnished journalistic reputation – something.

Potentially nailing not one but two former foreign secretaries, Messers Straw and Rifkind, admirably balanced between the main parties, in “a cash for access” row surely garners double journalist points.

Dodgy back-benchers are one thing, but Jack Straw and Sir Malcolm Rifkind surely quite another – with Rifkind promptly resigning on Tuesday as ISC chairman and announcing he will step down as an MP.

In what is clearly becoming the fashion in investigative journalism circles these days, the hackettes from the Torygraph teamed up with that radical Channel 4 outfit Despatches to try to lead the elderly politicians to perdition.

Ironically it was a multi-media team from The Guardian and BBC Panorama who got together to expose the disgraceful tax avoidance manoeuvres by a private Swiss bank owned by HSBC that earlier led to trouble for the Daily Telegraph.

Coverage in the paper of the HSBC story, or rather the lack of it – less even than that devoted to the issue by the Daily Star – in turn unleashed the ire of Peter Oborne. The rest is history.

As Richard Nixon and many less illustrious figures and institutions can testify, it’s the way you deal with a crisis that determines the degree of reputational damage – and indeed the outcome.

The Daily Telegraph’s reaction to the work of their formerly highly prized political commentator Oborne was, and remains, a master-class in how not to do things when trouble looms.

For two days the Telegraph was totally silent on stories alleging that commercial interference, coming from high levels, and motivated by the fear of losing HSBC advertising revenue, had skewed coverage of the story. Curiously, no room was found even for the Daily Telegraph’s own “rebuttal” statement, presumably on the grounds that to carry the statement might have required some perfunctory explanation about what the whole thing was about.

Then came the self-justifying Leader which is almost beyond the reach of parody.

To the extent that any rational theme can be detected hiding somewhere beneath the surface it probably goes like this: HSBC is a commercial entity and part of a financial services industry that employs more than 2 million people in this country. To attack such a company must verge on the unpatriotic and the Telegraph is patriotic.

So we don’t want to knock that do we, and if some people think we have down-played HSBC’s possible criminality then so be it. The Telegraph’s editorial stance was done quite deliberately and from the very best of intentions. The notion that it was done for anything even remotely connected with protecting advertising revenue is simply preposterous.

Or as the Telegraph Leader put it: “This newspaper makes no apology for the way in which it has covered the HSBC group and the allegations of wrongdoing by its Swiss subsidiary, allegations that have been so enthusiastically promoted by the BBC, the Guardian and their ideological soulmates in the Labour Party.”

Potential wrongdoing by banks therefore is just fine and dandy, and those who say otherwise are just a bunch of BBC pinkoes etc, etc…

As for the simple-minded souls who naively thought that journalists just like stories and get unreasonably enthusiastic about them, and that a bank helping multi-millionaires avoid their taxes gets the editorial juices going. How could they be so stupid?

From the Telegraph’s point of view the explanations are there for all to see. The bad guys can write or broadcast this stuff because errr…the BBC has a licence fee, the Guardian has a trust fund which means they don’t have to make a profit and of course The Times, well, it’s subsidised by its tabloid stable-mate – The Sun.

It’s obvious when you think about it.

This means, presumably, that only the Daily Telegraph is such a pure commercial beast – red in tooth and claw – that it has the intellectual and mental strength to be able to ignore the misdeeds of other capitalist miscreants, a bit like itself.

Until now we are just in the shallows of arguments still lightly brushed by a just-about-discernable logic of sorts.

By Saturday the Daily Telegraph had gone completely barking mad.

The front page attack on News UK, owners of the The Times and The Sun, was one of the most bizarre and tasteless in the long and distinguished history of dog trying to take a big chunk out of dog.

It would be enlightening to know who ordered the story written by a “Daily Telegraph Reporter” saying that two members of News UK’s commercial department had taken their own lives within weeks of each other.

Things have reached a new low when personal tragedies, such as suicides, are used as ammunition against commercial rivals. Shame on everyone involved at the Telegraph from top to bottom.

As mental health charities were quick to point out there is no simple explanation as to why someone chooses to kill themselves but it is rarely due to a single factor – such, for example, what the Telegraph was presumably suggesting – unnaturally imposed stress at work.

News UK, maintaining its dignity, explained that it had lost two members of staff “in unconnected circumstances” in recent months in its London and Manchester offices.

If there was ever a case where someone had to say it was time to stop digging it was the Daily Telegraph and its HSBC coverage.

It has gone from the merely embarrassing to the thoroughly despicable.

But credit where it’s due. Once they did the MPs expenses scandal when The Times for whatever ill-informed reason passed on the story and there is now a return to form.

But what has still not been plausibly addressed is why the Daily Telegraph’s HSBC coverage was so pathetic.

The only sign of hope – apart from Straw and Rifkind – is that the no apology Telegraph has in fact apologised, although you have to look very carefully to find it.

If the Daily Telegraph had done nothing wrong why-oh-why would they say in their Leader that the Telegraph was now “drawing up guidelines that will define clearly and openly how our editorial and commercial staff will co-operate in an increasingly competitive media industry.”

Why indeed – unless guilty as charged by Peter Oborne.