There’s been a long hiatus since my previous blog post, mainly due to the fact that I have been writing the final chapters of my book Peter Pan’s First XI.

But don’t worry: it’s not all work, work, work. I’ve also been busy enjoying spring (and what a spring it’s been!) by going to some interesting events over the past couple of weeks.

On April 23, I was at the Landmark Hotel on Marylebone Road as The Media Society presented their annual award to Jeremy Paxman. Andrew Harvey, the editor of the BBC staff magazine Ariel, wrote a funny account of the evening. Paxman was sat next to Michael Howard who was famously cross-examined by Paxman in an interview which has come to stand as an enduring statement of his confrontational style. But on this night, many of Paxman’s ex-colleagues, including Martha Kearney and Peter Barron, viewed it as an opportunity to get their own back. And Paxman sank deeper and deeper into his seat as a seemingly endless stream of anecdotes were gleefully thrown like bones to the dog-hungry audience of media-insiders.  When it was his turn to talk he seemed utterly bemused by the whole thing.

I remained in black tie, though with the addition of a top hat, the following night at a very different event: The Boston Mad-Hatter’s Tea Party on the Golden Hinde on the Thames, organised by Nicholas Immaculate and his band of merry pranksters, YesPlease! There were some magical costumes and orchestrated craziness which took on a very distorted Alice-in-Wonderland feel when I saw a 7-foot-tall Alice dancing below deck where the ceilings were so low that a Lilliputian would have needed to stoop. To use another literary comparison, it felt rather like being on the set of a grown-up Peter Pan. There are some great photos here.

A few days later I was at the Royal College of Physicians who have recently been accredited with museum status. The event was a celebration of this award.

Despite being founded by Henry VIII, the college is housed in a Grade I listed, 1960s modernist building  designed by Denys Lasdun, the same architect who designed the opinion-splitting National Theatre building on London’s South Bank. The college’s first home, between 1518 and 1614 was on Knightrider Street.

There was a very interesting talk about the foundation of the college in 1518, and the fact that it would continue for 500 years was by no means inevitable in those early years. There was competition and opposition to the college and for a number of years there were only actually a handful of physicians who were members of it. The medical profession was still in its infancy and the rise of the physicians had only just begun.

In the packed and sweaty atmosphere of the London School of Economics (LSE) lecture theatre last night it felt that there was something rather medieval taking place – a public dissection ‘by royal command’. 500 people had crowded in to hear a stellar cast of three prominent financial journalists, an MP and an academic pick through the rotting flesh of the banks and discuss why the media in particular had not forecast the spectacular economic crash that has been unfolding over the past few months. The event was prompted by the queen’s visit to LSE in November. When confronted with information about what was happening in the economy she commented: ‘it’s awful: why did nobody see it coming?’

Chaired by the director of LSE, Sir Howard Davies, the panel consisted of Liberal Democrat shadow chancellor Vince Cable MP, BBC Today presenter Evan Davies, city editor for the Daily Mail, Alex Brummer, assistant editor of the Financial Times Gillian Tett and Professor Willem Buiter of LSE, who also blogs for the FT.

‘If there’s one person that did see it coming, it was Vince Cable’, said Evan Davies, but Cable himself was circumspect and sober. ‘For politicians to complain about the media is as foolish as fishermen complaining about the sea’, he said, reassuring them that he had not come to ‘launch some great criticism’ of the media.

Evan Davies was economics editor for the BBC before he became a presenter on Today (‘You wait all that time for one story to come along,’ he said of his departure from the role in April 2008, ‘and then 1.2 trillion come along at once’). He was also philosophical about the role of the media in predicting the economic events that have taken place. ‘The press did not in any meaningful way warn the world that this was coming,’ he said, ‘but I think this is entirely forgivable, though there are also lessons to be learnt.’

Why is it forgivable? Davies gave a number of reasons, the first of which was human folly. ‘Human beings are a very flawed species,’ he said; ‘we’re not immune to natural biases, hopes, optimism, all sorts of baggage that human beings have.’ He also suggested that ‘the media tends to operate in a single dimension – good news or bad news; sunny or rainy, but not anything in between.’ And he made the point that although it is easy to look back now and say that warnings were made, warnings are always being made, all the time, about all kinds of things. The journalist’s role, according to Davies, is to try and assess how plausible those warnings are and that’s not always something they’re able to do.

‘The last reason the media didn’t get it,’ said Davies, is because ‘it’s not the job of the media to take a view that no one else is taking.’ In other words: if politicians, bankers and economists did not see it coming, then why should the media?

Both Alex Brummer and Gillian Tett said that financial journalists’ jobs were made harder by the mighty PR machines of the banking world. ‘Banks have a whole array of weapons to put journalists off track’, said Brummer. But Brummer, one of the most experienced financial journalists in Britain, also said that warnings that financial journalists had made in the past few years had not been given as much prominence as it now appears they should have. ‘Most of us have actually written about elements of what has been going on,’ he said, giving the example of an article he wrote in 2002 about concerns he had about Northern Rock’s securitisation business model. ‘It only made it to page 86 of the Daily Mail; the stories were not properly projected in the well-read areas of the paper.’

The constant theme among all of the panel members was that none of them saw what Willem Buiter called the ‘full shock and horror’ of what was about to happen; ‘the media didn’t see it coming; nobody saw it coming.’ But whereas the journalists seemed understandably to eschew any sense of blame or responsibility for not accurately predicting what was going to happen, Buiter was far more cynical about the role of journalism as a whole. ‘Most news is entertainment,’ he said, ‘the media don’t do complexity because their readers don’t.’ So it was easy, he suggests, for the media to be complicit in what he called the ‘immense example of collective delusion’ that risk had entirely vanished from the financial system.

‘I have spent the last 5 years wading through alphabet soup,’ said Gillian Tett, who told her story exploring what she calls the ‘murky’ side of banking, with all of its impenetrable jargon and acronyms, something that she agrees contributed to the ability of the financial system to delude everyone about its activities – even itself. ‘It was seen as being technical, boring and geeky to report on [derivatives], but it suited the banks to maintain this image,’ she said.

Her mission started when she used her anthropological training (she has a PhD in it) to map out what parts of the financial world the FT and other media were covering. She realised that there were huge gaps, so she resolved to try and fill at least some of these in. She moved to the highly unfashionable capital markets team (‘many people in the FT thought I was mad’) and ‘we started writing about what we saw and became more and more alarmed.’

In fact she was accused in 2007 of scaremongering, something which can now be seen as a great plaudit, of course, and Tett has certainly been one of the ‘stars’ of the credit crunch according to the Guardian. Her new book Fool’s Gold: How an Ingenious Tribe of Bankers Rewrote the Rules of Finance, Made a Fortune and Survived a Catastrophe is being published in March.
But even Tett did not anticipate the scale of what was about to happen and she agreed with Evan Davies when he said that ‘there’s no room for the I-told-you-so school in journalism.’

‘The coverage of the economy was an area of glaring silence,’ according to Tett, ‘the question going forward is not just about how the media goes about playing catch up, but what other areas of social silence are there that the media is ignoring.’

This Media Society debate was pitched as a contest: Broadband versus Broadsheet. The premiss suggested to me that the internet is a big cat that has appeared on the media savannah to mount a serious challenge to the long-held dominance of the newspaper lions. It sounded like a bruising and potentially bloody battle. But what all members of the heavyweight panel actually agreed is that a Darwinian struggle between print and online was unlikely to see a decisive victor in the near future and, perhaps, even, that the survival-of-the-fittest analogy may not be relevant at all.

The event was held on October 30 at LSE and featured Peter Barron, head of communications at Google Europe, and previously editor of Newsnight; Neil McIntosh, head of editorial development at the Guardian; Pete Clifton, head of editorial development, multi-media journalism at the BBC; and Margaret Manning, CEO of digital communications agency Reading Room and female entrepreneur of the year in 2008. The debate was chaired by the Earl of Stockton who was a foreign correspondent for the Telegraph and later ran Macmillan – his family publishing company.

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