Feb 17 2:20 PM

UK Telegraph killed story to please advertiser, says head politics writer

Saying that he had “a duty to make this all public” because “a free press is essential to a healthy democracy,” Peter Oborne, the chief political columnist for the conservative Daily Telegraph, Britain's largest selling broadsheet, has resigned and, as a parting gift, published a detailed list of instances where he says the paper’s leadership edited content so as not to anger major advertisers.

It has long been axiomatic in quality British journalism that the advertising department and editorial should be kept rigorously apart. There is a great deal of evidence that, at the Telegraph, this distinction has collapsed.

Late last year I set to work on a story about the international banking giant HSBC. Well-known British Muslims had received letters out of the blue from HSBC informing them that their accounts had been closed. No reason was given, and it was made plain that there was no possibility of appeal. “It’s like having your water cut off,” one victim told me.

But this story never appeared in the Telegraph or on its website. Oborne recounts at length his troubles in getting the story published — he was first told it needed to clear legal, but when legal said they never saw it, Oborne says an executive told him HSBC had a “bit of an issue” with the piece.

Oborne eventually published the story with openDemocracy.

The political writer then details a series of cases where HSBC and other advertisers either received favorable coverage from the Telegraph, or had unfavorable stories buried or killed, even when Britain’s other major newspapers lead with such news.

For sale: Newspapers on display at a local newsagent's shop in London in 2013.
Rick Findler / EPA / Corbis

Fearing what he said was the “collapse” of a paper he believes has an esteemed place in British journalism, Oborne sent his concerns in writing to Telegraph Chairman Aidan Barclay and Murdoch MacLennan, chief executive of the Telegraph Media Group. When Oborne offered his resignation, he said MacLennan told him advertising was “allowed to affect editorial,” but that — and here Oborne partially quotes MacLennan — “’it was not as bad as all that’ and adding that there was a long history of this sort of thing at the Telegraph.”

Oborne contends that the history only dates back a couple of years, when a Telegraph exposé on HSBC cost them that bank’s advertising revenue for a year. What ensued was a concerted campaign to regain HSBC’s business, Oborne said, quoting one Telegraph executive as saying HSBC is “the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend.”

All of this apparently escalated last week for Oborne, when the BBC, the Guardian and dozens of other major papers and websites ran stories on the latest revelations about the illicit practices of HSBC. By contrast, Oborne wrote:

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.

Lest U.S. readers think this is just transatlantic navel gazing, British Journalism watchers have equated this with a top columnist at the Wall Street Journal running to a major blog with the accusation.

The Telegraph, for its part, responded to Oborne by saying that while they offer a range of advertising options to their commercial partners, the distinction between editorial and advertising “has always been fundamental to [the Telegraph’s] business.”

Oborne seems to say it is the business that is fundamental to their distinction.

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