Today's the Day

A change of tack

2010-04-07T04:52:00.000-07:00

You'll notice this blog is no longer Robert Peston Watch. Irked by years of clumsy writing and interviewing on the Today programme, I've decided to change tack.

As a magazine editor by trade, I know that I generally have much more opportunity to edit, refine, sub and simplify language than the writers and editors at a fast-paced radio show such as Today. We have to cut them some slack.

But too often, the language used on BBC news programmes is lazy or confusing. Items are read out in a way that makes the subjects and objects of sentences confused; sometimes they're horribly or comically ambiguous.

I'd like to see the editors put a bit more emphasis on clear, unemotional, disciplined writing in news scripts.

And while they're at it, they could also school interviewers to ask brief, open questions. Every presenter on Today falls foul of the closed question (Naughtie actually manages to make his closed questions horribly rambling, too).

I think I know why: they're worried an open question will allow politicians to simply ramble on. Good. As a voter, I want to know if they're evasive, poorly-spoken, confused or one-eyed. A closed question doesn't actually stop them rambling - it just ensures they employ even more confrontational tactics and the interview becomes sterile.

Let's be clear. I love the BBC, I love Today and I appreciate the efforts of all involved in producing it. But if you love something, you must be honest about it - so that's what I hope to do here.

Today

2008-10-13T01:10:00.001-07:00

Robert's baaack. And he's back on form, too. Two things stood out from the "package" he presented at about 7.25am. First, he managed to get himself into the story, as per usual. Asked to describe the size of the bailout, he managed to refer to "my back of the envelope calculations" (apols for not transcribing it exactly - listen again might help if you want exactness...). The he made sure national productivity won't suffer, making sure we were fully awake by describing a coming "economic tsunami". Cheers, Robert. That's just the kind of informative, objective, level-headed reporting that makes me happy to pay my licence fee.

Oh, and before I forget. They very rarely move the furniture on the Today programme. Yet they bumped sport until after the 7.30am news headlines as a result of Robert's breaking story. Hmm. Why? What about that story couldn't wait until 7.32am? Answer? Nothing. The only justification could be that Robert has got a taste for moving markets and wants to rush the information out without a second to spare (a critical part of his BBC remit, natch). Of course, maybe he was worried rivals would just, you know, ask the Treasury about its publicised plans. Tsk. You'd think he'd have learned.

Robert: big "wow"

2008-10-13T01:07:00.000-07:00

While the broadcast media gets itself frothed up over a financial story appears not to understand very much (egged on by experts who do understand, but who have cunningly spotted that level-headedness isn't terribly telegenic, doesn't get them invited back onto the gogglebox and won't help them attract women), a bit of context.

So let's take Robert Peston's "wow" about the £50bn bailout for UK banks. A big sum of money, right? But not quite as big as the $222.6bn raised by "264 private equity funds during the first three quarters of 2008, 11% ahead of the $200.4 billion raised by 298 funds in the same time last year," according to Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst.

Point being, while the banking crisis is real - and is both caused by, and worsens, the down phase on the economic cycle in the real economy - in fact there is still plenty of money out there. People are still alive, and they work and eat and reproduce and want a flat screen telly (to watch Robert Peston on, no doubt) and a pint after work. PE is funds are doing well at the moment because investors don't have anywhere else to commit their cash; and because unlike quoted companies, they look over the immediate horizon and try to spot fresh opportunities (well, some of them do...) based on their understanding that life - and business- goes on.

All quiet on the Peston front

2008-10-10T05:49:00.000-07:00

So, no sign of Robert on the Today programme or his other usual haunts. But with his blog bang up to date, perhaps I should be watching the lunchtime news on the telly or something. Or perhaps he's just blogging from home during what must be the most well-earned break in broadcasting history. (I can't bear the man's style or approach, but credit him with a great work ethic...)

So let's look at the blog. Updated at 7.35am. And you know what? It's good stuff, so much better than his broadcast work. Perhaps the lack of unusual delivery helps, or maybe it's just because he's into the detail without too much scaremongering. (Maybe it's that his subject today - the expiry on Lehman's credit default swaps - is a genuine fart in the lift of the financial services industry, a lift that's currently stuck between floors.) It could even be that in print, I don't mind hearing his opinion on things about which he knows more than me - but when he's broadcasting, I want the facts not speculation. Either way, I enjoy him more in print than as an omnipresence in the airwaves.

(Lest you think I'm going soft or he's getting overly rational, check out the post from yesterday, the 9th. Peston in classic doom-monger mode. Lower shipping costs are a sign of global slowdown. They also mean lower overheads for businesses, falling inflation, reduced emissions of greenhouse gasses and less severe trade imbalances.)

Today

2008-10-07T23:35:00.001-07:00

Robert's ego-tic this morning is "...as I've been telling you for some time..." which he's used at least twice since I woke up about 15 minutes ago. Annoyingly, he doesn't appear to be adding much to our understanding beyond the official line in the Treasury press release (a problem that has be mentioned before, see below). The bail-out in fact sounds pretty simple: the government has created a line of credit that it will extend to banks in exchange for equity. It's actually cunning: there's lot of "taxpayers' money" at stake, but the conditions are sufficiently onerous that banks won't just dip in to the pool for fun. Plus we might all make some money out of it in the end.

Now Terry Smith, Peston's old boss, is on. I love Terry Smith. He talks straight, he's very articulate, he's very intelligent, he's down-to-earth and he's succinct. Which is by way of saying, wouldn't it be lovely if he were the BBC's business editor rather than his former employee, RP.

News at Ten

2008-10-07T14:13:00.000-07:00

"What I learned earlier on this evening is that there will be a £50bn package for the banks." So, Robert, what relevance does the fact you learned it have on the story? What, none? You mean you could tell us without inserting yourself into the story?

There's more: "What I've been talking to you about a lot recently..." Gosh, good job you're there to remind Huw Edwards that you're the same business editor that's been there for a few months. Peston lives up to his rep...

In other news, the package the BBC used to show the credit crisis moving into the "real economy" had a series of stat graphics. What did they show? Retail sales down. It's bad, folks, a year and a quarter into the credit crunch and consumer confidence has collapsed. The number? You want the number that shows this collapse? Retail sales are down one per cent. According to National Statistics: "Total sales volume in the three months to August was 2.5 per cent higher than the same period a year ago. Sales for predominantly food stores rose by 0.6 per cent. Sales volume for predominantly non-food stores rose by 2.9 per cent. Sales for the non-store retailing and repair sector increased by 11.0 per cent."

Other stats? Manufacturing output down (about 1.2 per cent - man the lifeboats!) and unemployment up by an unstated amount "to a level not seen since 1999". What, you mean the 1999 that marked a high-water mark for the economy before the dot-com crash?

Just to re-iterate: I'm not pretending there aren't problems out there. And I recognise that some people and businesses are having real difficulties - more will do so over the coming months. But do their troubles get better or worse when the national broadcaster spins the numbers to create sensationalist stories?

An expert speaks: Peston's diction

2008-10-07T01:39:00.000-07:00

Glad to see that we're chipping away at all points of the manifesto in our early links to other blogs. So welcome, Max Atkinson, a communications consultant who's picked up Peston's pesky presentational problems. You'd think being able to appear comprehensible on camera would be a pre-requisite of the job. Mind you, an ability to communicate complex ideas to a mass audience without resorting to patronising metaphors or sensationalism were probably on the job description, and he can't do those, either.

Fellow travellers

2008-10-07T01:30:00.000-07:00

Lest you think I'm alone in my Peston-related despair, I've done a quick blog search to try to locate like-minded anti-Pestonites. So welcome, Adrian Monck, to our ranks. Adrian rightly points out that Peston's ego-driven style means he often presents press releases as if they were nuggets extracted by water-boarding Deep Throat himself for the information he wouldn't give Woodstein. Well spotted Adrian. Your blog is a valued addition to the cause.

Welcome to the home of anti-Peston

2008-10-07T00:43:00.000-07:00

First of all, it's a miracle you're here. Thanks for dropping by. Robert Peston Watch has been set up because it's time we called out one of the very worst exponents of the shallow and sensationalist breed of business journalism that has catastrophic effects on both the public's understanding of complex issues and on real businesses.

I have three specific problems with Robert Peston, and all of them have been amplified as a result of the amount of screen and radio time he's been accorded during the credit crunch.

First, he's the worst kind of doom-monger. I appreciate that business coverage often gets stuck in the backwaters of broadcast news, which can be frustrating. Any business journalist will tell you that there are thousands of really great stories that never see the light of day because "people aren't interested" or "it's too complicated". But Peston's solution seems to be to talk up any potentially bad situation in the business or finance worlds to absolutely guarantee that Joe Public gets what he's talking about. That means he's always talking about a crisis when, in fact, there are plenty of positive things one could say about the current situation.

This amping up of the negative side stories is hugely corrosive to the national confidence, of course, which is the real determinant of how bad our situation will get - much more so than inter-bank lending or the collapse of one or two irrational investment banks. But the real issue I have with Peston's "we're all doooomed!" approach is that he's the business editor of the BBC. If he wants to be sensationalist about things, why doesn't he eff off to the Sun or Sky or the Daily Mail? The BBC is publicly funded, and that means it has an absolute duty to be balanced. The opinions of journalists are totally unimportant - our licence fee guarantees us facts, it's our insurance against any corporate takeover of information flows. So Robert: save your opinions for when you're back in the employ of Terry Smith over at Quest, hm?

Second, and following on from that last point, he's always putting himself into his reports. Listen carefully the next time you hear him on the radio or TV news. I guarantee he'll say something Peston. This morning, on the Today programme, it was a fairly tame one: "One of the bankers in that meeting told me..." Often he'll suggestively flag up that he is delivering an exclusive. Sometimes he'll refer back to Peston Past - "As I revealed on this programme yesterday..."

OK, Robert, shut up. Just shut it. You're paid to do your job, and you're getting a gazillion hours of screen time at the moment, so why are you seemingly angling for a new job? It's like you're saying to Rupert Murdoch, "look, all these exclusives, access to *my* network, could be yours..." It's tiresome - and it's bad journalism. Smartest editor I ever worked for told me, it's the height of arrogance and bad manners to put yourself in between the story and the readers. (Mind you, based on his appearances and my own dealings with him, Peston is both arrogant and bad mannered, so maybe this should come as no surprise.)

Third, and perhaps more contentiously, Peston's delivery is appalling. It's not quite as bad as when he started as business editor, but the fact he's made a deliberate effort to improve and it's still this bad is a sign that he should get the heave-ho. (Perhaps he already has. Perhaps he's working out a long notice period, which would explain his attempts to make the BBC less impartial and his excessive self-promotion...) He sounds like some little Englander trying to order Sunday lunch in Magalouf: on the assumption that something only he knows about must be very confusing for the listener, he talks slightly too loudly and places unusual emphases in his sentences.

So we end up with: "Well, Manuel, THIS is how it is. The LAMB is cooked, SLOWLY, intheoven while, as I can EXCLUSIVELY reveal to you HERE, the best WAY to present roast potayyytoes is to PARboil. Them. Then. Shakethemaroundinthe PAN. As I mentioned YESterday in your dining room, i AM allergic to brocolli, although my doctor TELLS me I can eat spouts. It's nothing. SHORT. Ofadisaster."

So, that's the manifesto. But I'm not going to pick solely upon Robert Peston. Lazy, sensationalist, ill-informed business journalism infects the broadcast media. So my targets are, in order, Peston; others at the BBC (which should know better); business broadcasters in general.

I'd love readers to send in sightings of poor and misleading business coverage - email me via my profile.