That Hbos-Lloyds Story and its implications

There has been a fair amount of controversy over Robert Peston's exclusive last week as he broke to the nation that HHOS was in discussions with Lloyds TSB and that there may have been trading in stock prior to the official announcement.

Peter Horrocks now responds to the criticism over at the BBC editors blog

Last Wednesday, after the announcement of the likely HBOS takeover, we received initial reports of queues forming outside HBOS branches in Middlesbrough and Glasgow. We were aware that there was a possibility of outflows of deposits from HBOS. However we decided that queues in two places were not conclusive evidence of a widespread financial phenomena. We decided to wait and watch. The queues later dissipated. I have no doubt that if we had gone ahead at once with broadcasting pictures of those queues that could have had an impact on HBOS.

The reporting of the breaking news has been criticised for being of a highly speculative nature and remember that this time last year it was Peston that was tipped off over what became a run on the Northern Rock .

A number of outlets have speculated that persons unknown made money out of the announcement .This from John Swain in the Telegraph

Speculators made £190 million by trading HBOS shares shortly before news of the bank’s rescue by Lloyds TSB was announced, it has emerged.News of talks about the takeover came in a broadcast made by Robert Peston, the BBC’s business editor, at 9am on Wednesday morning.
By that point, HBOS’s share price had plunged to just 88p. Yet within 45 minutes, Mr Peston’s broadcast had sent them soaring to 215p.

Peston though makes clear that the story was not broken before 9.00am that day.

How the American media is following the economic slowdown

Project for excellence in Journalism have been tracking the American media's coverage of the economic slowdown,particularly tracking the coverage against the movements in the economy.

The study found that

the connection between media coverage and economic events has often been uneven. Sometimes, coverage has lagged months behind economic activity, when the storyline was dependent on government data. Other times, coverage has tracked events erratically, as with housing and inflation. But when the story is easier to tell, as in the case of gas prices, coverage has been closely tied to what is actually occurring in the marketplace.

Strangely the study found that

The economy has been a bigger story in older media—print, the three network evening newscasts and traditional news radio—and a noticeably smaller one in the newer—the more opinion-oriented platforms of cable TV and talk radio.

and in America in the period from Jan 2007 to June 2008,it overtook the Iraq war in popularity although the Presidential campaign leads by a long way

Robinson gets his facts wrong

BBC political editor Nick Robinson comes in for some critisism over his reporting of the alleged Labour backtracking on the fiscal rules.

Over at Comment is Free-Frank Fisher says

less than heartening to see Nick Robinson at the BBC ignoring the foundation for an effective Q&A format: if there's one thing guaranteed to produce a wrong answer, it's a wrong question.

Fisher looking at his performance on last night's Ten o,clock news says

His response to the suggestion that Gordon Brown is to abandon his key fiscal rule, extending government borrowing beyond the 40% mark, was to put in the public's mind this quandary Brown, or any other PM, faces: "Do nothing and the government would be faced with a stark choice - tax us more to make up the shortfall or borrow more and break their fiscal rules."

adding that he

could almost sense a million angry middle-aged men shouting at the telly, in true pantomime style: "Oh no it bloody isn't!" The third choice, cutting spending, the prudent response to any overspend, national or personal, didn't get a look-in

.

Again this morning on the today programme he maintained the same line as the previous evening.Why is this the case asks Fisher?

the BBC could spin the line that while the choice isn't restricted to two options in a wider reality, in a political reality it is – but that simply doesn't wash. Not only do viewers expect a more detached analysis of facts, not spun facts, from a supposedly independent broadcaster, but those are not even political facts.

Evan Davis blames media for under inflating bad economic news

Interesting comments from former Economics editor and now Today presenter Evan Davis.

Interviewed during the Radio festival in Glasgow he says that the corporation should have given the public more advanced warning of the coming recession.

According to Davis

I do ask whether we did our best to warn people of impending problems, I don't think we warned people sufficiently loudly or clearly.....

When everything is going well no one is interested in hearing it. Some of us suffered from giving the warnings a bit too early in the whole cycle. By about 2005 that warning was beginning to lose credibility."

Rather strange given though that he was the man chraged with telling the nation

(via Press Gazette)