Scientists argue that rich nations must make drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to prevent dangerous climate change. The way energy is used, priced and created would have to change in order to institute these cuts.

Ahead of elections in Britain, which must be held before June 2010, Dave Timms of Friends of the Earth shared his thoughts with Reuters on what the group thinks the next government needs to do in order to build a low-carbon economy.

Last week I was told that Reuters has lost its ethical bearings. You've sacrificed the sacred tenet of accuracy by rushing to publish information without checking if it is true. Your credibility has suffered, the value of your brand will wither and the service you offer to clients has been devalued, I heard.

It was a meaty accusation, especially as it came in the midst of a debate on ethics in journalism held at the London home of ThomsonReuters, the parent of the Reuters news organisation. The charge came from former Reuters journalists and a senior member of the trustees body that monitors Reuters compliance with its core ethical principles.

So what specifically were we being accused of and what defence did I offer?

On the 8th anniversary of the Sept 11th attacks, a day of more than normal sensitivity to security matters, CNN in the United States reported that the U.S. Coast Guard had fired on a boat in the Potomac River in Washington D.C. President Obama was visiting the nearby Pentagon at the time. Reuters rushed out a story on the reports of gunfire, citing CNN as the source for the information, while urgently checking with law enforcement officials. It transpired that CNN had been monitoring radio traffic on an unencrypted Marine frequency and had overheard a training exercise in which crew members shouted 'bang bang'. Quickly we put out an update to our story making clear it was a false alarm.

I had played a part in crafting our policy on handling such stories and from my place on the debate panel I offered another example for the audience to chew on.  On Oct. 21 Britain's Sky News reported that the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi had died in Libya. We put out a story, sourced to Sky News and repeating how it said it had the information of the death, while checking with officials and al-Megrahi's legal team in Scotland. We quickly established that Sky had it wrong and updated our story to say so.

It is grating for any journalist to publish information that turns out to be incorrect. Even if we can say that the original error was made elsewhere some of the flak hits those who replicate the mistake. After all, those who republish a libel are as liable for it as its originator. 

So why did we not check first and publish later? 

The answer goes to the heart of how the news business has changed, how the notion of authoritativeness has altered and how Reuters journalists interpret the values they live by.

But first let's scotch one myth. Embarrassing publicity notwithstanding, it is relatively rare for Reuters to publish what turns out to be an erroneous report by another news organisation. Since we instituted our current policy on 'pick-ups,' as they are known in the trade, the level of 'echoed mistakes,' has neither grown nor fallen.  

To provide a complete service to our customers our policy is to pick up stories of significance that are being carried by normally reliable media that are in a position to know what they are reporting.   Hence the decision to quote CNN, which has a good record on reporting its own home turf, or Sky, which has broken news on the Lockerbie bomber story and follows it closely.  We protect our reputation by carefully acknowledging the source of the information and speedily checking its veracity. And hundreds of times every day Reuters journalists decline to go with a story running on local media because it 'smells' wrong, is trivial, or both. Mostly that decision is vindicated. The old school would have it that our policy is a failure of journalism. Yet walking the right line between publishing everything and publishing nothing actually requires a finer exercise of judgment. Better journalism, in other words. 

The counter-argument is that we should only publish when we have 100 percent certainty from our own sources.  That may be possible for a news organisation with a longer publishing timescale, such as a newspaper, or a periodical magazine. Yet even they, with online arms that are increasingly as 'real-time' as Reuters, the Associated Press or Bloomberg, face the same challenges of dealing with fast-breaking stories as the news agencies.  With the advent of the Internet has come a cacophony of online voices that amplify and accelerate information, frequently dropping reference to where it originated or how it first became known. In that environment readers look to news services like Reuters to tell them what is known, and how it is known, with clarity and speed, regardless of whether we originated the story or not. In a complex, fast-moving world, no news organisation, no matter how well-resourced, can be first to report everything. All of us target the news we want to break and rely on others, who are sometimes allies and sometimes competitors, to paint their part of the picture.   

Has our approach destroyed the relationship of trust that our clients and readers have with us?    

The question supposes there was once a golden age of authoritative journalism where sourcing was always rigorous and the pursuit of truth always relentless. History suggests otherwise. Current anxiety over journalistic values is often a proxy for broader worry over the health of the media industry. Declining revenues have driven cost cutting that has threatened, many feel, the standards of journalism. Reuters is stressing speed for fear of losing its audience, critics say, and will do so at the expense of its reputation for accuracy.  

Yet our business has always put a premium on speed, and given that we are one of very few global news organisations that is expanding its staff during the downturn we feel we are doing the right things to maintain our audience.

The nature of authority in the news business has also changed. Real-time readers understand breaking news is contingent, uncertain and provisional. Exclusivity evaporates fast as aggregators, citers and plagiarists disseminate the fruits of others' reporting toil. Respect is won by breaking news and by operating with clear rules and standards. But it also come from guiding readers carefully to the reports of others, binding the audience in with compelling packages of conversation, illumination and curated content.

When the first plane hit the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, Reuters did not put out a story instantly. We were so mesmerised by the unbelievability of the event, and so uncertain over how to handle what we saw on CNN, that we froze. How many readers were lost that day and how many on the day of the Potomac gun battle that never was?

— Margaret Doyle is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are her own –

Three months is a long time in the markets, and particularly for banks. Alongside the rally in bank shares, investors have also bid up bank bonds, especially so-called tier 1 bonds which rank just above the equity in the list of creditors.

In some cases, the prices these bonds have tripled and, overall, yields to perpetuity have halved across the sector, according to Morgan Stanley.

This rally has now overshot and the risks are on the downside. Despite being labelled debt, tier 1 is pretty much like equity: issuers can stop paying coupons, the coupons do not always accumulate if missed and the issuer can choose not to “call” (redeem) them at the call date.

So the additional protection they offer over bank equity is not great. This is why prices crashed last autumn along with those of bank equity.

Over the past couple of months, confidence has returned as governments across Europe have recapitalised their banks, removing the risk of a systemic failure.

The ensuing confidence has enticed private banking clients — who are missing the income traditionally provided by dividends and bank interest — into this market.

Moreover, banks have themselves been buying back their own debt, trying to lock in the “profit” that many have booked on the write-down in the value of their debt.

Institutional investors have committed much of their substantial cash holdings to this market too. These factors have driven up prices.

However, the juicy yield that has enticed recent buyers may simply disappear: issuers could simply pass the coupon.

This is what has happened with Bradford & Bingley, a failed British bank whose loan book is being run down by the British government. Last week’s announcement failed to damage other bonds, suggesting that investors see B&B as a special case.

This assumption may prove too optimistic. Most banks are short of cash and will be tempted not to pay their tier 1 coupons if they do not have to.

This is especially true of state-owned banks, like RBS and Lloyds, and Ireland’s AIB and Bank of Ireland that are not paying dividends.

Their state paymasters may consider “optional” coupons to be a poor use of precious capital.
Moreover, the European Commission may stop them from doing so. It has already prevented Commerzbank from paying out on hybrid bonds.

The Commission is currently examining the British and Irish state guarantees and may conclude that insolvent banks should not be making discretionary payments to bond-holders who, after all, are typically institutional investors who should understand the risks inherent in such instruments.

The biggest risk — that investors will be wiped out by nationalisation — has not gone away, even if it has subsided.

If banks do need any more government bail-outs, the terms are likely to be harsher than in the past. Even in the absence of full-on nationalisation, governments may choose to impose a debt-for-equity swap on bondholders.

After all, everyone else — depositors, shareholders, taxpayers — have borne some pain. Why should bondholders be any different?

- John Duncan is the United Kingdom Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control and Disarmament. He comments regularly via Twitter and on his own Blog. The opinions expressed are his own. -

Nuclear disarmament has been rather knocked out of the foreign affairs headlines over recent weeks by more immediate concerns over potential pandemics, the Indian election and the endgame of the long running conflict in Sri Lanka. But last week while the world’s media were looking elsewhere the international arms control and disarmament community took a remarkable step to break what has been called the “Decade of Deadlock”.

For more than ten years, interminable wrangling over arcane procedural points has prevented agreement over even the agenda for the major Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty which takes place in New York every 5 years. Hardly surprising then that the last Review Conference in 2000 2005 ended in stalemate. Many feared that the next one in 2010 would suffer the same fate.

However diplomats meeting in New York at the preparatory meeting (known as a PrepCom) which concluded on Friday surprised many by rapidly agreeing the agenda and procedural issues for next year’s conference. It seems they had at last heeded the calls for action by senior world leaders, both past (see the numerous op-eds by Messrs Gorbachev, Shultz, Kissinger, Rifkind and others) and present (Presidents Obama, Medvedev, Sarkozy) and Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s call to see the nuclear debate as intrinsically linked to the other momentous challenges we face in today’s world and that these challenges are best addressed together.

In their Arms Trade Treaty initiative, the British have shown that modern grand coalition diplomacy can succeed, working with countries as diverse as Argentina, Kenya and Japan to confront the scourge of conventional weapons proliferation, which so seriously undermines international efforts to promote peace and prosperity in the worlds poorest regions.

The challenge for nuclear proliferation is as just as great where the UK aims to turn common purpose into common action in our shared global society by securing agreement on a comprehensive multilateral strategy to allow nations safe and secure access to civil nuclear power, reduce the risk of proliferation from civil programmes and achieve real progress in multilateral nuclear disarmament.

But is a community who have spent quite so long arguing over technicalities well placed to deliver the sort of political vision in the nuclear field set out in President Obama’s Prague Speech earlier this year? Only time will tell. Emerging blinking into the harsh light of the policy debate last week in New York clearly caught some unawares. Despite coming close to an unprecedented agreement on a series of detailed policy recommendations on the substance of the debate for next years Review Conference, I suspect that we will indeed need the President’s proposed Nuclear Security Summit to inject some more of that vision and energy into a community which “has seen it all before”.

The UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon was doing his part this week in Geneva flanked by the Algerian and Swiss Foreign Minister’s calling for another part of the multilateral diplomatic architecture, the Conference on Disarmament to get down to work on a new Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty, a basic building block, together with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, that would cap the further development of nuclear weapons and set us on the path towards a world free of nuclear weapons.

– Alexander Smith is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

Ferdinand Piech needs to decide whether he ’s driving a Porsche Cayenne or a VW Touareg. The Volkswagen chairman and part owner of Porsche cannot continue to drive both. He should step down as chairman and hand VW CEO Martin Winterkorn the wheel to negotiate any merger talks between the two carmakers.

Piech’s shareholding in the Porsche holding company leaves him hopelessly conflicted. However hard he tries to balance his responsibilities, Piech is always going to be left open to accusations of double dealing and almost certainly to legal challenges by minority shareholders should a deal be struck.

While the companies can’t even agree at the moment whether they are in talks or not, what is clear is that Porsche is in a real hole after its failed takeover attempt of VW left it with a 51 percent stake but 9 billion euros in debt.

Porsche is probably right about the industrial logic for a merger, but it has been in denial about the depth of its problems and therefore the strength of its negotiating position.

VW CEO Winterkorn has rightly highlighted this in a VW memo leaked over the weekend in which he calls for “full transparency” about Porsche’s financial situation — bizarre given that Piech is a Porsche board member and must know.

Winterkorn should not return to the negotiating table without Porsche fully opening its books. He owes it to VW’s minority shareholders, its workers and 20 percent shareholder Lower Saxony not to entertain a deal which would jeopardise their positions.

Porsche needs to resolve not only a huge debt burden, but also falling sales and the quandary of what to do with options on another 20 percent of VW shares. Last but not least, the Porsche and Piech families which control the company appear at odds on what is the best way to secure the company’s future.

A merger with VW looks like an “honourable” way out, but one that is fraught with difficulties in keeping all the interested parties happy. Piech is not shy about own his views. He was vocal in his criticism of Porsche’s top management team last week, adding that VW had no intention of taking on Porsche’s debt or the risks associated with its options positions in VW.

But his own fortune — his family stake is worth around 1.8 billion euros — and the future of the firm established by his grandfather Ferdinand Porsche depend on a deal being struck.

There is no real way for Piech to reconcile these competing demands. It would be best for shareholders in both companies for him to trade in the Touareg for the Cayenne.

— At the time of publication Alexander Smith did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. –
(Editing by David Evans)

- Sharon Bratley is chartered financial planner at Fair Investment. The opinions expressed are her own. -

What does the decision by the Bank of England to keep interest rates at a record low of 0.5 percent mean for the average Briton in retirement?

Well, unfortunately things are not looking good for pensioners at the moment. The official rate of inflation may be on its way down, but in real terms inflation remains high, particularly for pensioners. This time last year, the cost of everything from gas and electricity to a loaf of bread cost less than it does today, and despite falling inflation, prices are slow to come down from their peaks of late last year.

Take energy bills for example – there are millions of pensioners living in fuel poverty, yet it is only in the last few weeks – as the summer months approach – that energy companies are finally bringing down their prices – although still at a fraction of the rate that they increased at.

Add to this the fact that RPI, which pensions are linked to has fallen to below zero, and it is no surprise that many pensioners rely on other savings and investments to supplement their incomes, which is why the failure to increase the base rate will come as a further blow to pensioners.

This time last year the base rate stood ten times higher than it is today at five percent, and savings account rates reflected this. But as the average no notice savings account rate is now 0.65 percent (according to Moneyfacts.co.uk), pensioners who are having to rely on their savings are finding themselves left high and dry.

Since interest rates tumbled from their heights of last year we have seen a change in both the economy and the way that consumers treat their finances. In recent months investment houses have been inundated with new applications for investment products as consumers turn their backs on conventional deposit accounts offering low returns.

However, investment is not always the best route for people, particularly those in financial hardship. One of the most important things for people to do is face up to facts and seek impartial advice from somewhere like the Citizens Advice Bureau, who can then point them in the right direction.

– Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –

A revisionist theory on the causes of the global financial crisis blames surplus countries like China, Japan and Germany as much as highly-leveraged, deregulated finance in the United States and Britain.

Making Germany a scapegoat may be tempting, especially in Britain, where memories of sterling’s humiliating exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992 still rankle, but it is unfair and dishonest.

The revisionists contend that the meltdown was due not just to the Americans and British who borrowed, traded and lived beyond their means but also to the Chinese, Japanese and Germans who sold them the goods and lent them the money.

It follows that responsibility for digging the global economy out of its current hole lies disproportionately with the surplus countries, which must spend their reserves or go deeper into debt to boost demand and give the world a fiscal stimulus.

Seen from Berlin, this interpretation of global imbalances looks like a brazen attempt to punish German fiscal and economic virtue and divert attention from the irresponsibility of “Anglo-Saxon” financial capitalism.

Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck has a 10-second summary of the origins of the crisis.

“My short formula is that a policy of cheap money in the USA afer Sept. 11 (2001), plus a paradigm of deregulation, plus the race for yields combined with illusions about risk, led to excesses and hubris which today have seriously shaken the world financial architecture,” he told visiting journalists last week.

Germany was slower than the United States, Britain or France to recognise how hard the crisis would hit its economy. It faces a deeper recession than any major economy except Japan, with a contraction of 6 percent of gross domestic product this year.

After early hesitation, it has enacted two stimulus packages which the government says are worth 81 billion euros ($107.6 billion) over two years. Combined with automatic extra welfare spending and lower tax revenues, it says the measures amount to about 4 percent of GDP. Ministers note that half of the German premium for scrapping old cars has been spent on imports, benefiting European neighbours and Asian exporters.

Steinbrueck acknowledged that dependency on exports, which account for 40 percent of GDP, made Germany more vulnerable to the collapse of global demand. The world export champion had a trade surplus of 178.2 billion euros in 2008.

Yet government leaders are convinced Germany will be able to export its way out of crisis as key markets recover, provided it keeps labour costs and public deficits under control. They see no alternative to the export-driven manufacturing economy. If that means cutting wages and working longer to stay competitive, so be it.

Two-thirds of Berlin’s exports go to other EU countries, mostly to the other 15 members of the euro zone. Since the EU is a customs union, its trade balance should arguably be considered as a bloc. Seen in this light, it had a modest deficit in 2008.

While critics of China’s export-led growth accuse Beijing of keeping the yuan artificially low, no one can accuse Germany of manipulating its currency. On the contrary, the euro has been strong on world markets, and the Germans entered the single currency in 1999 at a rate that was initially hard on them.

Germany imposed sacrifices on its taxpayers to balance its budget in the years before the financial turmoil began. Martin Weale, director of Britain’s National Institute of Economic and Social Research, argues German saving is no more than is needed to make reasonable provision for its ageing population, while Britain and the United States “decided not to make adequate provision for their collective old age”.

The OECD forecasts that the impact of the crisis will push the German deficit to 4.5 percent of GDP this year and 6.8 percent in 2010. So Berlin is understandably loath to sign bigger cheques to underwrite countries that were less prudent in the boom years, whether in the Europe or beyond.
Nevertheless, Germany has broken a taboo by making clear, without going into details, that it will help, if necessary and with conditions, to bail out any EU country that faced default.

So don’t blame the Germans for making machines, cars and chemicals that other people want to buy. And don’t bash them for living within their means and not having a property bubble.

Perhaps the lesson of the financial crisis is that we all need to become a bit more German.

(Editing by David Evans)

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

A little girl in my family got a typewriter for Christmas.

Not a laptop. Nothing with a screen. A typewriter. The old-fashioned manual kind with a smeary ribbon and keys that stick.

Typewriters had pretty much gone the way of dodo birds, car tail fins and cigar-chomping editors who yell “Stop the Presses” quite some years before my granddaughter was born. But it was the typewriter used by the school-age, aspiring journalist in the movie “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" that captivated her.

Or maybe it was the way the typewriter was used. In the movie, a tween-ish girl, played winningly by Abigail Breslin ("Little Miss Sunshine"), does old-fashioned journalism and writes stories that help right a wrong in Depression-era Cincinnati. Kit may be young, but in a challenging environment she keeps her wits—and a strong sense of ethics—about her.

In today’s rapidly realigning media landscape, typewriters have long since given way to laptops, BlackBerries, camera phones, video phones and Twitter. But here at Thomson Reuters, and in the media as a whole, the need for a strong sense of ethics has never been more necessary.

Not all Hollywood depictions of our profession are that inspiring to would-be journalists — mainly because of the way some on-screen reporters behave.

Take "Ace in the Hole," Billy Wilder’s 1951 tale of a reporter (Kirk Douglas) who cynically prolongs and manipulates coverage of a man trapped in a cave in the hope of returning to the big time. Douglas’s Chuck Tatum is as cynical as Kit is idealistic.

“I can handle big news and little news,” he tells an editor. “And if there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog.” Later, referring to a sign in the newsroom that reads “Tell the Truth,” Tatum acknowledges some guilt. But, “Not enough to stop me. I'm on my way back to the top, and if it takes a deal with a crooked sheriff, that's alright with me! And if I have to fancy it up with an Indian curse and a broken hearted wife for Leo, then that's alright too!”

In both movies, the journalists use typewriters. It’s what they do with them that makes the difference. And today, it’s what we do with our hardware—the journalism we produce—that makes the difference.

At Thomson Reuters, there are five Trust Principles that form the bedrock on which our journalism rests. The principles, adopted by Reuters in 1941 and fully embraced by Thomson when it acquired Reuters in 2008, state that:

• Thomson Reuters shall at no time pass into the hands of any one interest, group or faction;

• Integrity, independence and freedom from bias shall at all times be fully preserved;

• Thomson Reuters shall supply unbiased and reliable news services to newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters and other media subscribers and to businesses, governments, institutions, individuals and others with whom Thomson Reuters has or may have contracts;

• Thomson Reuters shall pay due regard to the many interests which it serves in addition to those of the media; and

• No effort shall be spared to expand, develop and adapt the news and other services and products of Thomson Reuters so as to maintain its leading position in the international news and information business.

To me, at the heart of these principles are the preservation of integrity, independence and freedom from bias and the requirement that we expand, develop and adapt to maintain a leading position in news and information.

It means ethics and standards are compatible with innovation. In fact, they have to go hand in hand.

It means independent and unbiased news reporting. It also means embracing blogging, multimedia storytelling, providing knowledgeable and insightful columnists like James Saft and Bernd Debusmann; engaging with our community of users and taking advantage of the offerings of citizen journalists in You Witness. It means being ready to use technology and storytelling forms we haven’t thought of yet.

There’s a lot of room for innovation here, but there’s no room for a Chuck Tatum, who would do anything to get to the top.

In about 2020, my granddaughter will probably be using technology that hasn’t been developed yet to work on her school “newspaper,” and it almost certainly won’t be produced on paper. She won’t be using her typewriter but she will, I hope, be using what she’s learned from the journalists of this generation. It’s up to us to set the right example.

I recently visited one of the most frightening sites on the Web—the place where I look at my shrinking retirement account.

As I calculated the investment loss since the steep decline in the markets began, and particularly since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, some questions arose (in addition to: Will I ever be able to retire?).

--Did we in the media do our job in reporting on the run-up to the crisis?

--Now that an “official” recession has been declared in the U.S. and the depth of the crisis is becoming clearer around the world, are we in the media keeping things in perspective? Should we even be using words like “crisis” or “meltdown?”

On the first question, I can’t help thinking of Claude Rains’ “Casablanca” character Captain Renault, who was “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on” in Rick’s club. In hindsight, given the current state of the financial markets, wasn’t it obvious a problem was brewing?

Not necessarily. And it probably wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone reading online or print coverage or watching television news in the United States.

A look at a study by the Pew Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism indicates that, in the United States, coverage of the economy was pretty much drowned out by coverage of the presidential election—at least until the two stories converged in mid-September. Indeed, as the Pew material shows, in the month preceding the week of Sept. 15, which saw the Lehman bankruptcy, the Merrill Lynch sale, the AIG bailout and large drops in share prices, the proportion of the news hole devoted to the economy reached a low for the year, filling only 4.8 percent of the time on television and radio and space in the print and online media. Since then, that focus has shifted, as the presidential campaign narrative became, again, “it’s the economy, stupid,” and as the presidential transition has focused on U.S. economic problems.

Reuters News Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger is skeptical that financial journalists could have done much more to predict the depth of the crisis.

“Journalists do best when reporting what's happening and giving the news context and analysis,” he said. “We also do well when we look backwards and discuss past events from the perspective of the present. We do least well when we prognosticate. While our reporting and commentary did discuss potential weak points in the economy, we did not -- and nor frankly could we -- accurately predict the calamitous events of this year.”

Schlesinger worries, though, that there was a certain inevitability to the crisis and that the media played a role.

“I do worry about the narrative lines of reporting that contributed to the crisis,” he said. “To take just one example, much of the crisis was caused by banks taking on excess risks in the pursuit of higher profits. Yet had a major bank president stepped back from that fray and declined to participate, the ‘grammar’ of our results reporting would surely have compared that bank's results negatively against expectations and against its peers.

“That brave bank president would surely have lost at least his bonus and probably his job. The very fear of that kind of negative comparison helped spur things on -- as Citibank's ex-CEO Charles Prince said (while still in his job), ‘As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.’

“We in the media help play that music, probably exacerbating the highs on the way up and the lows on the way down.”

So did our reporting help change the tune that was being played? Did it raise questions about the factors that contributed to the crisis, including complex financial instruments, subprime mortgage lending and excessive risk?

To fully answer that would require a deeper analysis than we have room for in this space, but there is evidence that questioning notes were sounded.

As early as Aug. 18, 2003, a Reuters story quoted Fed governor Edward Gramlich citing the dangers of “predatory lending” in extending subprime credit. By 2006, the pace had accelerated. A Factiva search of Reuters News found 128 stories that mentioned the phrase “subprime mortgage” that year, including a number in which analysts predicted a deterioration in credit quality. The crescendo came in 2007, when there were more than 10,000 stories that referenced subprime mortgages and when Reuters.com built a special section to house material on the issue. That section developed into the current Crisis in Credit and Housing Market sections.

Still, the overall “music” was loud and infectious and it’s easy to understand why so many couldn’t stay off the dance floor.

Now that the crisis is here, some are accusing the media of deepening the problems. Richard Lambert, director general of the CBI, a U.K. employers group and a former editor of the Financial Times, said “careless headlines or injudicious reporting risk becoming self-fulfilling prophecies of a very serious nature.” He urged journalists to be especially vigilant in their fact-checking and called on the press to avoid such words as “panic,” “fear” and “chaos.”

He also suggested that journalists should cut bankers, regulators and politicians a little slack, since “precious few journalists gave any hint at all of what was about to come.”

The FT’s Lex column (Note: subscription required) accused Lambert of shooting the messenger and lamented that some would “seek to clamp down on the fourth estate…, hoping regulation will recreate a golden age when the business press was a tamer, more deferential beast” that “could be hushed up in times of financial turbulence.”

But those days are gone, as Lex put it. “The digital revolution, by lowering entry barriers and intensifying competition, has put paid to all that. It will not return.”

And good riddance. As a card-carrying lover of the First Amendment and the digital revolution, I’m happy those days are gone. But with our freedom comes a sometimes frightening responsibility, especially in troubled economic waters.

As Schlesinger says, “We have a responsibility to be careful, and most of our reporting has been very careful. But we too have played some discordant notes and we need to learn from that.”

What do you think? Did we in the media do our job in reporting on the financial crisis, both before the market collapse in September and since? Are we being careful enough not to sow panic and make things worse? How can our reporting help you weather the storm?

Please post your comments here.

I’ll be using this space regularly to explore issues arising from Reuters and other media coverage of the world and to have a discussion with you. Among the topics I plan to look at: the dangers and rewards of covering religion; the use of anonymous sources; the debate over shield laws for journalists, and much more. I’ll also be providing lots of space for you to have your say.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching that retirement account.

Dean Wright, Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards