Bye-bye "unbiased"?

Another corporate casualty

“For more than 150 years, Reuters has been one of the great independent news organisations. No longer,” writes the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston. “This morning it has agreed to be bought for £8.7bn by Thomson of Canada.”

Having been schooled in the dark arts of hackery by disciples of the Baron, it would be easy to get overly sentimental. A former colleague counsels against it:

There are some great journalists at Reuters, in print, video and pictures, and some great former ones who got killed in pursuit of their work. They are, or were, far better journalists than I could ever hope to be. Their organisation, however, is not the unblemished force for good that it likes to project as its image. It fails miserably to bring the independence, impartiality, integrity and freedom from bias that is needed to throw clear light on the world’s problems. That, in the very least, would demand unrelenting analysis and criticism of the issues presented by global capitalism and the holders of capital, most of whom are Reuters clients past or present. It can claim to do a better job than many other media organisations but that’s hardly difficult.

The rot started decades ago. Having survived without profits for 120 years, Reuters staked its future on a black box called the Monitor. This gizmo and its successors fed headlines and exchange rates to bankers at their desks, enabling them to sell currencies to each other. Ever since, the news agency this was supposed to be subsidising has taken a back seat to the business of flogging trading systems (and the bulletins that offer punters constantly updating reasons to gamble in a $2 trillion-a-day casino).

For a while it was a licence to print money, which is pretty much what the journalists who ran the company did. Then the markets got wise to their woeful grasp of management and the price of Reuters shares collapsed, just as I was being offered an option to buy some at five times their value.

Enter Tom Glocer, an American lawyer who’s spent the past couple of years negotiating himself a new corporate shell to get rich in. So much for the empty rhetoric he’s supposed to fill full of the promise of what Reuters once claimed to want to be. Not any more.