How well have financial journalists acquitted themselves in the current crisis? Were they too passive - ignoring signs of an overheated, overcomplicated market which, in retrospect, any old fool could see was about to implode? Or too assertive - making too much of early signs of trouble and creating the panic that led from Northern Rock to Lehman Brothers and beyond? Or did they just avoid the harder financial analysis in favour of easy stories about 'fat cats'?
These were the questions that Professor Steve Schifferes put to his panel at the City University/BBC College of Journalism debate Saints or Sinners: The Role of the Media in the Financial Crisis last night.
Whatever the finer points, financial journalists, as Larry Elliot of The Guardian admitted, have had "the time of our lives in the past two years ... an absolute ball. We've really, really enjoyed ourselves." Suddenly his opinions on arcane financial matters were being sought by people in the newsroom who once ignored him. Financial journalists were "no longer just the pointy heads in the corner".
And so it was last night, as Elliot and three other practitioners heard a critique of media output from three academics.
Damian Tambini of the London School of Economics had been studying financial journalists. and suggested that, as a class, they were less comfortable with holding their subjects to account than political journalists, who saw the watchdog role as a central part of their job. (His report, What Is Financial Journalism For?can be downloaded here.)
Professor Charles Goodhart, also from the LSE, was more forgiving, excusing journalists for not foreseeing the crisis on the basis that, by definition, "Crises only occur when people don't foresee them."
Finally, Alistair Milne of the Cass Business School complained that the media had "lost the ability to think about the bigger issues" such as how our economic system, on the whole, performs remarkably well. Instead, he said, singling out the BBC, there are pointless reports of the daily movement of the stock market, meaningless to a non-specialist audience and already known to those who are interested.
Of the journalists, Faisal Islam of Channel 4 News was the most ready to admit the shortcomings of his profession. He said journalists had known about the bigger picture - international liquidity issues - and the small picture - such as over-extended mortgages for individuals - but had failed to make connections between the two.
He accepted that financial journalists often faced a dilemma, wondering, for instance, whether drawing attention to over-valued house prices was "doing our job" or just spreading panic.
And he said that his own employer "pulled its punches" on the story of struggling Icelandic banks, knowing about it for months before broadcasting.
But his strongest rebuke was for personal finance journalists, who he accused of "implicit low-level corruption" in their "quite shocking" closeness to the companies they report on. He talked about journalists accepting free trips and taking press releases at face value.
For the BBC, Hugh Pym, Chief Economics Correspondent, said he did see financial journalists as having a watchdog role. But he pointed out that even the watchdogs - whether academics or journalists - didn't always know what was going on: when the Queen famously asked on a visit to the LSE why nobody had predicted the crisis, Pym said it took the LSE months to agree on an answer, which was eventually posted to the palace.
Michael Wilson, formerly of Sky News, took up the theme, saying that at the height of the crisis bamboozled government ministers simply demanded that the banks come up with a solution - and fast. He said that today we are in a new position of uncertainty, not knowing how far into the crisis we are, or what will happen next.
Charles Goodhart was prepared to predict that the crisis so far - in which policy-makers had put their foot on the accelerator as hard and fast as possible - would turn out to be much easier to manage than the task ahead, which was to steer between the dangers of inflation and deflation and its associated unemployment.
This wasn't a debate about the economy but, inevitably, discussion had strayed onto that. Alistair Milne sent a chill through the lecture theatre by raising the possibility that "the real storm is yet to come", saying that the problems so far would be as nothing compared to the consequences if government itself lost its credibility in financial matters.
Would that scenario produce even better times for Larry Elliot and his colleagues? For all the fun they've had, none of the journalists was brazen enough to say they looked forward to even worse financial news.
