From a letter to the Financial Times:
So why did journalism fail? One only needs to examine the financial industry’s elaborate programmes to cultivate the media to realise that journalists are confronted with significant conflicts of interest between their job as reporters and individual desires for recognition, access and advancement. Banks lobby journalists in the same way they lobby any other constituency: through measured public affairs departments, conferences and parallel marketing. Good journalism requires access, and there is a whole hierarchy of access, institutional ranks, and so-called information: who gets invited, who is asked to speak as a “media leader”, who attends dinners. How can a journalist resist the machine that treats him so well?
