Britannia Radio

Financial hacks are as guilty as the bankers

Journalists should take some blame for economic turmoil after failing to hold fat cats to account, says PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE

Everybody condemns the financial regulators for not doing enough to stop the malpractices perpetrated in the last decade by the City fat cats. The regulators must have known what was going on and chose to look the other way.

But does not the same criticism apply to the City journalists, who must have known, or at least suspected, that the fat cats  with whom they spend so much time wining and dining  were up to no good?

Why didn't they do a bit of investigative journalism; spend as much time and trouble exposing the financial fat cats who were lending money which they hadn't got, as their political colleagues had spent exposing those who had made illegal contributions to the political parties?

I fear we all know the answer to that question. While the relationship between political journalists and politicians is healthily antagonistic - ­vide Jeremy Paxman -  that between City journalists and City financiers is, to put it politely, co-operative. (No names, no libel writs.)

If there had been a political scandal on the scale of the recent economic one, the political journalists would have cried blue murder, as their role as the people's watchdogs requires them to do.

Of course some City journalists expressed concern over the years, but only in the abstract, rather in the same way as meteorologists express concern about the weather.

But political journalists, encouraged by the proprietors, go for individual jugulars. Nothing comparable has been done in the financial pages. There are no photographers camped outside any financier's front door.

Yes, financial regulators have badly fallen down on the job. Scandalously, however, so have the financial journalists.