Incompetent Media Complicit In Whitehaven Hoax

Notably almost absent from all the media “analysis” of Jonathon Moylan and friends’ hoax press release last Monday is self examination. I’ve found one piece.

The naïve reporting (and re-reporting) of a transparently amateurish, copycat hoax is unfortunately typical of the quality of what mostly passes for journalism these days. So is the near universal “innocent” shrug of the shoulders after the hoax was revealed.

There used to be a requirement for journalists to understand their field, so that they will know instantly when a report doesn’t smell right and have a wide network of contacts who they could call to check its veracity. The requirement to investigate reports prior to publication was understood. It appears that is often no longer the case.

In the internet age, the rush to publish seems to have caused previous standards of journalism to give way to an ethos of delivering “content” or “information” without the responsibility of verification.

The “story” was a fake press release, purporting to be from Toby Kent (a real person) Group Head of Corporate Sustainability in ANZ’s corporate affairs section, stating that ANZ had decided to pull its $1.2B in funding from Whitehaven Coal’s Maules Creek coal project.

The Age published it on their website, as did the Daily Bull. You can’t find the original articles on their sites now, of course. A Google search for “ANZ pulls Whitehaven funding” used to find the (broken) links to the articles. They are probably still there, dozens of pages down, for those who have the time to spare.

How could financial journalists have been so easily duped? There are obvious clues that the press release is a fake. Did they not think to ring Toby Kent at ANZ, or someone else senior if he was unavailable? Do any of these people have one iota of basic common sense, let alone professional competence?

Firstly, no bank would ever pre-empt a public company by announcing withdrawal of funding for a project, because that is market sensitive. The company would first request a trading halt from the ASX, then make the announcement itself. The bank may subsequently issue a clarifying statement, but in most cases would not. Any competent journalist should know this. Any financial journalist who doesn’t should be sacked.

Secondly, banks rarely make lending decisions for “social reasons”. That should have rung an alarm bell by itself. Exceptions to that rule usually involve old school morality around in particular, sex, as in Westpac’s gutless reneging on funding Sydney brothel Stiletto’s expansion.

But mining doesn’t give banks ethical problems around reputational risks. If the project is legal, has no sovereign risk and a sufficient IRR, they will usually lend.

If the financial media had been doing their jobs, or had actually known how to do their jobs, the story would have been: “Activists Attempt Whitehaven Share Hoax”.