It is interesting to sit here and watch the tables turned as leading financial journalists today face a grilling live on TV about their role in the banking crisis only to watch them turn around and blame the banks’ PR.

The Treasury Select Committee put an illustrious panel of leading financial hacks under the spotlight including the BBC’s Business Editor and star-of-the-moment Robert Peston alongside Sky News’s business presenter Jeff Randall and Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times.

One particular issue strikes at the heart of journalistic responsibilities. Whilst discussing the collapse of Northern Rock they wanted to know if the BBC’s report that the bank was in trouble caused the run on the bank and therefore influenced the news or if they were merely reporting the facts as they had received them.

Which came first the chicken or the egg?

Peston’s accurate report that Northern Rock had gone to seek emergency funding from the Bank of England in September 2007 was cited by some critics as helping to prompt the run on the Newcastle-based bank the following morning.

Peston tells the MPs he had thought long and hard about his role in the crisis and then blames its PR team!

Northern Rock, he says, brought problems upon itself by publishing impenetrable press releases which further worried already concerned customers.

What about the BBC's renowned pictures of the long queues at the bank? the Committee asks. The pictures did reinforce customers' worries, Peston concedes.

But it is not clear that there will ever be a resolution to this. As he and other commentators have said what else could he do if he is in receipt of such newsworthy information? Bury it?

As many commentators have pointed out, can you imagine the furore if he hadn’t broadcast anything and the bank still collapsed only for MPs to find out the BBC had known all along but not broadcast the information?

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Julian Fisher