CorpComms Magazine

Credit crunch seems such an ineffectual name for what amounts to a global meltdown of the banking system as we had come to know it. The media revels in tagging momentous events with memorable and evocative titles. 9/11 conjures imagery and personal recollections in all of us. Tsunami may be a geophysical phenomenon previously known only to Geography GCSE students but which is now synonymous with catastrophe and human misery. But ‘Credit Crunch' sounds more like a breakfast cereal!

One of the major problems is the enormous difficulty that the mediums of radio and television have covering such an event. It is just so intangible. There are no weeping children, smashed houses, burning buildings or floating cars. Television depends on the visual image to the extent that journalists allocate words to an item not in proportion to its newsworthy significance, but to fit the availability and length of sensational video footage.

Radio on the other hand depends on (until now) an almost endless supply of interviewees and spokespeople eager to put themselves forward to expound their version of wisdom even if this means they will be put to the sword by John Humphrey's incisive interrogation (or is that contradiction?) on Radio 4's Today Programme. (If I ever weaken and accede to their summons to appear before the microphone, I would be unable to contain myself from enquiring as in that famous Monty Python sketch: Is this the five minute argument or the full half hour?)

In who's interest?

Returning to my point, however, I ask Where have all these victims gone? At the time of writing, Iceland is in meltdown and my Evening Standard has a front page dominated by the bemused expression of Alastair Darling explaining from a Westminster bunker how he has just handed £500 billion of our money in the form of copper bottomed guarantees to the City boys. But even the picture is a screen grab. So presumably wherever all the spokespeople have fled, the paparazzi have gone too! I'm starting to think it feels almost like a media version of a five-minute warning.

So with nobody interesting or controversial to interview (and no politicians either) where is the BBC to turn. Enter stage right, Robert Peston - he of the bizarre delivery and idiosyncratic intonations. We've been treated over the last weeks to interminable doses of his patronising explanations of the momentous events going on around us in the money markets. This giant of broadcast economics gleefully recants to his studio anchor how it was he who leaked to the market that the Treasury were in ‘secret, emergency, rescue' talks with the major clearing banks to bail them out. This was just enough to tip the market into freefall and whether or not these talks were in progress or not mattered little. This was the self fulfilling prophesy of the century.

And so here's the rub. The spokesmen - the experts, if you will - those with real knowledge and experience of what was happening dared not submit to the instant news, sensationalist, two minute soundbite version of analysis now peddled by the broadcast media. To their credit, they maintained their silence for fear of unsettling an already spooked market (and mindful of the watching Financial Services Authority). Maybe the media feels no such responsibility in its regulation.

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