U.K. Paper Allegedly Spiked HSBC Stories

Peter Oborne, The Telegraph’s former chief political commentator, published an editorial on OpenDemocracy.net Tuesday criticizing the British newspaper’s reluctance to publish negative stories about advertisers, in particular banking giant HSBC. Oborne says a story he wrote about HSBC closing the accounts of well-known British Muslims got spiked, while another story about a “black hole” in HSBC’s accounts was removed from the newspaper’s website. While other papers exhaustively covered a blow to HSBC profits as the company prepped for an investigation into “the rigging of currency markets,” the Telegraph dedicated only “five paragraphs in total on page 5 of the business section,” Oborne writes. Oborne said the paper didn’t want to lose HSBC advertising.