Fisticuffs in Edinburgh as Peston refutes Murdoch's distorted market

A crashing response to James Murdoch's speech in Edinburgh from the BBC's Robert Peston

The Observer reports that

At an official dinner following the speech, Murdoch and Peston – who were sitting with the Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark and the BBC chairman, Sir Michael Lyons – became involved in a discussion about banking deregulation which progressed to the flashpoint of whether or not the BBC was patrician, according to those who were there.
Murdoch apparently banged the table and shouted: "How dare you?" with Peston shouting back: "If you think you can get fucking angry, I can get fucking angry."

The BBC put together a concerted effort to refute Murdoch's allegations that it was stifling competition including Peston himself who in a speech yesterday afternoon hastily incorporating comment on the previous evening

You can read the speech in full at Peston's blog but this is what he had to say about the competition model

Market-based democracies like ours need two kinds of essential infrastructure: robust financial systems that transmit cash and allocate capital where it will be most useful; and competing independent news groups that distribute impartial information so that people can take control of their lives and rein in the over-mighty. Now we have just seen the near total collapse of our financial infrastructure, to a large extent because of misguided deregulation of banking; so we have to ask whether there is any rational basis for believing that withdrawing all regulation and subsidy from the news market would be any less costly to our way of life.

Peston on our media obsession

on the day that Carter's conclusions are published, one question is why the digital industries are more deserving of ministerial attention than - say - pharmaceuticals, or defence, or motor manufacturing, or food and drink, or civil aviation.

Writes Robert Peston this morning,noting that this may well be the first time that the country has seen a white paper on digital Britain.

But is it for the best as he adds

If you work in those industries, you may think "thank goodness ministers aren't meddling with us".

Peston points the figure

Last night's journalism leaders forum at Uclan never really got started until the question and answer session at the end.

The star of the show,the BBC's Robert Peston, appeared via webcam.

Ahead of his appearance this morning in front of the commons select committee looking at the media and the financial crisis,he recognised that the media would have to look closely at itself in how it reported the crisis.

However his anger was directed at the people he termed those on he termed the people on high salaries who are paid to monitor and regulate.

Kevin Anderson,head of Guardian blogs, made the point that he felt the media had failed to do their job."a failure of journalism is when someone asks why should something that happens in China makes me lose my job" he said.and added that another of the failures arose due to the global nature of the crisis

"Journalists didn't act globally together to pull together the global elements of financial complexity."

There was also a consensus feeling that PR and the advertising model had a role to play.Journalists were perhaps a little too eager to take for granted what they were being told.

Head of journalism at the college Mike Ward questioned the panel as to whether people would lose interest in economics once the green shoots of recovery start to appear.

As a conclusion,the panel agreed that there was a shortage of financial journalists.Perhaps,they felt, journalists need the essential skills of understanding business to report on that same business

So what is a real blog then Robert?

An intersting comment from Robert Peston at the Society of Editors conference( via Journalism Co.UK)

The king of financial journalism considers that his BBC blog is not the real thing because he doesn't use it to speculate.

I apply exactly the same standards of verification to a blog as I do to anything else I do.
“I can do two things with a blog: I can get stuff out very quickly; but the most valuable thing about the blog if you work for an organisation like the BBC is that you can put out an amount of detail you can’t get in a three minute bulletin.”

Howard takes a swipe at Peston.

It has not all been sunshine and publicity for the BBC's economic guru Robert Peston.

Accusations of having priveleged access to economic governemnt from the horses mouth have surfaced on a number of occassions and now Guido is reporting events from Westminster where former Tory leader Michael Howard has

has written to the FSA to ask for an investigation into the leaking of intensely market sensitive information

Peston to the fore

I have to admit that I was never a big fan of Robert Peston.His almost condescending manner and chatty style led me more to turn off or over.

Yet he has been on our screens and radios constantly over the past few weeks as his specialised subject has hit the headlines constantly.

This morning's Independent carries a profile of him and it is well worth a read.Having just listened to his analysis of the latest financial crisis on Radio 4,my views are starting to change

Here is a taster

Extraordinary, I mean quite extraordinary, I've never in my career known a period of such intense change," is how he describes his working life over the past weeks, a period of such "absolutely frenetic activity" that he has been obliged to work "16 or 17 hour days, more or less non-stop".

He came to the screen after a career exclusively in the print world

He talks of the "appalling and scary" experience of his first appearance on the flagship Ten O'Clock News (which he repeatedly refers to as News at Ten, for which Huw Edwards will surely forgive him in view of the 17-hour days). "You think 'Oh my God, there are five or six million people looking at me now and I'm sure I'm not going to be able to speak'."

A person I am sure that we are going to get more and more used to in the next few months

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.