Blame the messenger?
The blame game has started. Who's to blame for the run on the Northern Rock - the management for their over-reliance on the money markets to fund their business, the regulators for not reacting quickly enough to guarantee the safety of depositors' cash, or the depositors themselves for panicking and ignoring the reassurances of the authorities?
We have also seen (on this blog, amongst other places) that some people blame the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ for its reporting of the crisis.
From the moment the story broke - a terrific scoop by our business editor Robert Peston on Thursday night - we were clear we had to handle the story carefully. We talked internally about the need to be responsible in our coverage - not to provoke panic but to tell people straight what was happening (see Peter Horrocks' blog on Thursday).
We set out to be restrained and factual. We have given plenty of air time to Northern Rock, to the Chancellor and the to reassure depositors and we have repeated those assurances throughout our coverage over several days. But despite this, obviously we had a run on the bank - I think this is down principally to two things:
1. The power of the images of long queues forming and...
2. The fact that for many people this was indeed a 'rational' thing to do, if you were exercising the precautionary principle. Until the Chancellor's announcement on Monday evening unequivocally guaranteeing that no depositor would lose money there was just a chance - a remote chance - that things might unravel in such a way that people would lose money (in part because the current compensation scheme does not pay back the full amount after the first £2000). So as one customer in a queue told us, "I'm not panicking, I'm being completely rational".
Should we have carried images of the queues? Of course we should and everybody did. The public needs to know what's going on - but we had a responsibility to do it in a balanced way. So the fears of those interviewed in the queues were set against the reassurances of experts from the financial services industry and the politicians and the regulators. It is not the fault of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ or the media in general that these assurances were not believed until the chancellor removed all doubt.