Saw this trail in the Telegraph…
Fake news is about more than just elections: it can topple banks, sink firms, and ruin lives
….not just fake news….real news can sink banks and ruin lives if revealed injudiciously and without regrd to the consequences.
Ten years ago the once BBC’s Robert Peston’s desire for a scoop caused a run on RSB and banking confidence to fail thus triggering the banking crisis in the UK. He reported that the Bank of England was loaning RSB emergency funding despite knowing that this might cause panic in the markets and on the high street as people banking there would be alarmed and would then head to the bank to withdraw their money as indeed happened.
The BBC’s Robert Peston was accused of helping to trigger the tumultuous fall in UK bank shares on Tuesday by breaking news of a private meeting between the Chancellor and bank bosses.
Viewers and listeners awoke to hear the Corporation’s business editor reveal that three of Britain’s biggest banks – Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB – had asked Alistair Darling for billions of pounds in funding.
But the report by Mr Peston – rapidly becoming known as the man who moves markets – set off a fresh bout of chaos in the City, with shares in RBS plummeting by almost 40 per cent, wiping around £10billion off the bank’s value.
City traders were angered by his report, which unleashed renewed market turmoil, and there was astonishment at the Treasury and fury within Government that news of the secret meeting had been given to Mr Peston.
Amid speculation over precisely who ‘leaked’ what to the BBC man, one political website described him as a ‘market menace’.
Mr Peston revealed details of the meeting – clearly highly sensitive at a time of unprecedented City jitters – on air and on his BBC blog early on Tuesday morning.
Under heavy selling pressure, shares in all three banks fell after Mr Peston’s report, fuelling fears over the health of Britain’s banking system.
Peston denies it all...his defence is that he was reporting the truth and would do so regardless of the consequences….
He told the Treasury select committee he had acted responsibly in reporting the facts, which were from multiple sources and had been checked.
Mr Peston said he had never held off from reporting a story he knew to be true to serve a wider interest.
However he did admit elsewhere that his reporting caused a meltdown…
Three years later, in another article, Mr Peston admitted: ‘In my naivety, I had thought I was merely doing an impartial reporter’s job of describing Government thinking, based on conversations with ministers and officials in Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Treasury.
‘But this was one of the rare occasions when a news story became a political event in its own right.
‘Markets went crazy, share prices went through the roof, enjoying their biggest-ever one day rise.
‘The reverberations were felt in bond markets and foreign exchanges – and caused the occupants of numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street to lose their bearings.’
What was the purpose of Peston’s revelation? It served no good purpose other than to provide him with a scoop. Revealing the emergency funding would cause only harm and it did.
Peston’s defence of reporting the truth doesn;t ring true because he also revealed in his book that he knew the economy was on the rocks and that a crash was coming but he didn’t report that…he deliberately held it back.
So Bob, Nick & Faisal walk into a bar… and decide they are impartial.
FIN.
Unfortunately, this was one of the worst examples of a state broadcaster saying something which they assumed the gullible public would suck up and believe.
He should have been out on his ear, taking his whining voice with him.
His ‘book’ on his ‘whatever’ on any business skill is presumably about three pages long, with the colouring bit at the end for some light relief.
Of course, nulab loved it all, as they were thought to be the saviours for a short couple of minutes, until we all realised this was Brown and Darling we’re talking about.
Dreadful time for business. I saw many good honest friends go down at the hand of that load of leftie Charlatan shite, ruining the economy hand over fist – especially ‘fist’ in Brown’s case. He’d have had all three of mine had I ever seen him close up.
I wouldn’t actually blame the bbbc, Peston was a pussy, it was the people up above, engineering it all.
BBC , now report something that is true and serves a wider interest ; the Gramscians at the BBC .