Chief political commentator says newspaper fears losing bank’s advertising money
The fallout from the recent allegations of tax fraud against banking giant HSBC deepened yesterday after Peter Oborne, chief political commentator at The Daily Telegraph, one of Britain’s most influential newspapers, quit the publication as he accused the paper of hiding the accusations against the bank in exchange for ad money.
In an open letter, Oborne called the paper’s coverage of HSBC a “fraud on its readers,” and quoted a long series of incidents that convinced him The Telegraph was deliberately hiding or refusing to investigate any of the long list of accusations that the bank faced in recent years to preserve its positive commercial relationship with the financial institution.
Oborne also questioned coverage of other major companies such as Tesco.
He suggested that the paper was being soft on “big corporations and rich men,” but the paper’s relationship with HSBC was at the heart of his screed.
The conflict of interest, Oborne said, could be traced back to HSBC’s decision to pull its advertisements out of the paper back in 2013, after a series of reports over the bank’s operations.
Since then, he added, pressure on the newsroom against HSBC criticism became commonplace.
A former Telegraph executive told him HSBC was “the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend,” Oborne said, while others added that authorities were even expressing concern about headlines on “minor” stories.
“Anything that mentioned money-laundering was just banned, even though the bank was on a final warning from the US authorities. This interference was happening on an industrial scale,” an unnamed Telegraph journalist was quoted by Oborne as saying.
HSBC’s advertising account was eventually won back 12 months later.
In the meantime, Oborne says a story in which he worked, explaining how the bank closed the accounts of politically active British Muslims “out of the blue” and with no specified reason was blocked from publication at the site due to “legal concerns,” although the legal department of the paper later told him they knew nothing about that story.
But it was the recent coverage of leaked documents that suggested HSBC facilitated tax evasion on a global scale that ended up pushing him to quit in the end, he said.
“You needed a microscope to find the Telegraph coverage: nothing on Monday, six slim paragraphs at the bottom left of page two on Tuesday, seven paragraphs deep in the business pages on Wednesday. The Telegraph’s reporting only looked up when the story turned into claims that there might be questions about the tax affairs of people connected to the Labour Party,” Oborne wrote.
The Telegraph denied the allegations, noting that it “never commented on individual commercial relationships, but our policy is absolutely clear. We aim to provide all our commercial partners with a range of advertising solutions, but the distinction between advertising and our award-winning editorial operation has always been fundamental to our business.”
— Herald staff
