³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

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 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ 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 ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ or the media in general that these assurances were not believed until the chancellor removed all doubt.

Some callers to the Audience Log asked why Tuesday's rise in profits at Marks and Spencer was reported so widely.

The answer is simple: M&S is an iconic High Street brand - famously Margaret Thatcher bought her underwear there and today we learn in the papers that Gordon Brown buys his there too! Broadcast or print we are all agreed that M&S is a story. It's a store that everybody knows, one of those British brands that everyone has heard of and has a view on - millions shop there.

On top of that, M&S is recovering from the most traumatic collapse of its long history and was at the heart of a tough-fought takeover battle two years ago. So yesterday's coverage was all about how is the turn-around going - is M&S back to what it was. Answer: not yet!