Britain | Press standards

Telegraphing the decline

A conservative columnist launches a blistering attack on his employer

SCARCELY a pillar of the British establishment has been left unstained in recent weeks. The queen’s second son, Prince Andrew, has been accused of having sex with an underage girl (which he denies); politicians of all stripes are knocking election-season lumps out of one another; the City has been accused of yet more cronyism and greed, in allegations that the Swiss subsidiary of HSBC, one of Britain’s biggest banks, helped rich clients avoid paying tax. Now the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s prime quality daily of the right, founded in 1855 and popularly known as the Torygraph for much of the time since, has come under fierce attack from one of its own.

On February 17th Peter Oborne, the paper’s chief political commentator, published a blogpost which, in true Fleet Street fashion, can only be described as explosive. Mr Oborne, a quixotic but highly respected commentator, warmed up by accusing his employer of plummeting editorial standards, in terms of quality and seriousness. Rather quaintly, he equated a recent confusion, on the front page, between “deer hunting” and “deer stalking” with the paper’s publishing, on-line, of a story, allegedly known to be false, about a woman with three breasts. Yet this was only Mr Oborne tuning up.

His main allegation was that the Telegraph’s commercial and editorial operations had become dangerously entwined. “It has long been axiomatic in quality British journalism that the advertising department and editorial should be kept rigorously apart,” he wrote, on the Open Democracy website. “There is a great deal of evidence that, at the Telegraph, this distinction has collapsed.” As prime evidence, he cited the paper’s coverage of the ongoing scandal involving HSBC, which happens to be one of its bigger advertisers.

Most British daily newspapers had gone big on the HSBC story, Mr Oborne noted—the Guardian helped break it, the Financial Times (which is owned by Pearson, which part-owns The Economist) splashed on it for two days running, the Times and Daily Mail devoted several pages to it. The Economist covered the story here. By contrast, wrote Mr Oborne, “you needed a microscope to find the Telegraph coverage”, which was cursory and mostly buried in the Business section. This, he wrote, “amounts to a form of fraud on its readers”. The Telegraph “utterly” denied the charges, saying that the questions raised by Mr Oborne were “full of inaccuracies”. It insisted that the distinction between its advertising and editorial operations “has always been fundamental to our business”.

Mr Oborne alleged that the HSBC coverage was part of a long-since troubling pattern. Over the past year, he claimed, the Telegraph had glossed, bumped up or otherwise cynically tailored its coverage of major advertisers, such as Cunard Line, a shipping company, and the Chinese government—whose repression of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong he alleged it had downplayed. He described a comment piece on the protests as “bizarre” and said it had been followed by a column by the Chinese ambassador to Britain whose “headline was beyond parody: ‘Let’s not allow Hong Kong to come between us’.”

Troubled by such examples, Mr Oborne revealed that he had tendered his resignation in December—as a matter of “conscience”—but resolved to “go quietly”, until the HSBC story aroused his ire. “After a lot of agony I have come to the conclusion that I have a duty to make all this public.”

Subsequent researches, he claimed, had pointed to what appeared to be worse editorial breaches. The Telegraph has a good name for breaking stories—such as the fraudulent MPs’ expense claims it published in 2009. Yet three years ago, Mr Oborne alleged, members of its investigations team were deterred from pursuing much the same story on HSBC-related tax avoidance as has now come to light. According to Mr Oborne, “HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is ‘the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend’.”

Strangely perhaps, given Mr Oborne’s claims, the Telegraph would seem to be under less pressure to curry favour with advertisers than most British newspapers; it is by far Britain’s most profitable quality daily, having made £60m in profit for its reclusive Scottish owners, David and Frederick Barclay, in each of the past two years. Yet the pressures on its business model are nonetheless plain. A decade ago the Telegraph’s circulation was well over a million. Now it is around half that, and dropping—like some of its readers, who are among the most aged of any national newspaper.

“There are great issues here,” Mr Oborne concluded. “They go to the heart of our democracy, and can no longer be ignored.” Yet there is every chance they will be. Collapsing readership and a great expansion of online and other non-traditional media outlets has coincided with growing scepticism about British journalistic standards. The danger is that that scepticism and abuses such as those Mr Oborne alleges at the Telegraph could become mutually reinforcing. If so, his heroic cri de coeur is less a rallying cry for a beleaguered industry than a harbinger of further decline and decay.

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