Telegraph hits back at Peter Oborne’s ‘astonishing’ attack

As news comes through that Swiss police are searching the Geneva offices of HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) as part of an inquiry into “suspected aggravated money laundering”, the explosive departure of Peter Oborne from the Daily Telegraph - over what he claimed was its lack of coverage of the HSBC affair - continues to make waves

Oborne announced his resignation as the paper's senior political commentator yesterday with a long article for Open Democracy, in which he accused the paper’s management of suppressing HSBC news coverage for fear of losing advertising revenue.

The Telegraph has hit back, saying the "distinction between advertising and our award-winning editorial operation has always been fundamental to our business" and adding: “We utterly refute any allegation to the contrary.”

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A spokesman for the paper said: "It is a matter of huge regret that Peter Oborne, for nearly five years a contributor to the Telegraph, should have launched such an astonishing and unfounded attack, full of inaccuracy and innuendo, on his own paper."

As the BBC’s David Sillito reports, the Telegraph is not alone in finding Oborne’s article “astonishing”. Fellow journalists have been stunned by Oborne’s bold gesture, while professor Jay Rosen at New York University calls it "one of the most important things a journalist has written about journalism lately".

Oborne’s attack is “not just a parting swipe at an employer by a disgruntled member of staff," writes Sillito, "it's an explosion of anger about an issue that is worrying journalists across the industry”.

Oborne claimed that "shadowy" executives at the Telegraph were interfering on an "industrial scale" with basic news coverage. In comparison to other newspapers’ coverage of the recent BBC Panorama film about HSBC, "you needed a microscope to find the Telegraph coverage”.

Coverage of Oborne’s departure was particularly tricky for The Spectator, which shares a proprietor with the Telegraph. But Alex Massie blogged for the magazine that Oborne “performed a public a service today by resigning his post”.

“His [Oborne's] suggestion that the Telegraph has, shall we say, a rather too cosy relationship with some of its advertisers – and especially with HSBC – is not the kind of allegation made without good cause or serious consideration," writes Massie. "Nor is he alone in wondering if the good ship Telegraph sails as serenely as once it did.

"Many journalists who might once have been reckoned Telegraph types to their toenails have left the paper in recent years, often involuntarily.”

But Massie adds that if the Telegraph is wounded by Oborne’s attack, “it is also the case that HSBC’s already bruised reputation has taken another battering today... The idea it can think it reasonable to bully and threaten newspapers if they dare to run ‘unhelpful’ stories is another example of an over mighty corporation that evidently thinks the world deserves to be arranged in ways that comfort HSBC.”

And that was before the police entered the Geneva offices of HSBC (Private Bank) Suisse.