Back when I worked for a newspaper in Texas, our biggest rival got caught inflating its circulation numbers and overcharging advertisers based on the false data. Several other large papers around the country were steeped in similar scandals at the time.
The fact that my own paper steered clear of such behavior didn't surprise me in the least. My confidence had nothing to do with our circulation folks, as I didn't know them and couldn't vouch for them. And it wasn't that our numbers were much better than anyone else's in the down-on-its-luck newspaper business. What assured me was that no matter how I tried, I just couldn't picture our then-publisher, Wes Turner, being okay with us engaging in these kinds of shenanigans.
Wes cared deeply about the bottom line at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, but he also cared about his advertisers, subscribers and staff, not to mention the paper's reputation and his own standing in the city. He was just that kind of guy. So the idea of him suggesting or even just turning a blind eye to fraudulent circulation data simply did not compute.
It's been eight years since the circulation scandal at my old rival, the Dallas Morning News. But a July 26 article by Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post got me thinking about it again. In her arresting piece on the Libor scandal, Huffington struggles to reconcile Barclays' involvement with the Barclays she thought she knew-the Barclays where a manager at a London branch "changed [her] life" by granting her a loan when she was 25 and nearly broke and trying to get her second book published. "[I]t's now clear that the Barclays of my early years in London is quite different from the Barclays of today," she writes. "It wasn't so much that Barclays had changed, but that banking itself had changed."
Just as devastating were her comments on the strangeness of how casually the Libor fraud was carried out, as evidenced by traders' emails ("Dude. I owe you big time!) and the notes in their planners ("Ask for High 6M Fix.") As Huffington observed, "This isn't how master criminals talk-there's no hush-hush, burn-this-letter-after-reading drama, It's the banal, everyday tone used by people who assume this is just how things are done."
When he resigned as CEO of Barclays, Bob Diamond chalked up the move to the "external pressure" on the bank, saying it "reached a level that risks damaging the franchise [and] I cannot let that happen."
What a bogus excuse. A more realistic statement might have read: "Whether you believe I was a ringleader in this or not, several employees had the impression that our bank would be tolerant, if not wholeheartedly supportive, of this kind of behavior, which is an unforgivable sin of management and the reason I am stepping down."
CEOs needn't take the fall for every corporate scandal; there are bad apples in every sector, and their actions don't always reflect the morals of their bosses (though they may reflect gaps in risk controls or good judgment about people). But in the Libor scandal, it's clear there were more than just a few bad apples involved. More likely, the whole apple tree was diseased.
Our cover story this month features someone who has helped to restore some of my faith in bankers after this summer of scandal. Bianca Buckridee is social media operations manager at Chase, where she leads the team behind the @chasesupport Twitter handle. When I met her at a conference a few months ago, I was intrigued to hear how she was training her small group to assist customers with all kinds of Chase products-checking accounts, cards, mortgages, auto loans and so on-with each bit of outreach done in 140 characters or less.
Many bankers talk these days about breaking down product silos and putting customers first. Buckridee is the real deal, and I hope you will be as inspired as I am by the story of her pioneering career.
Heather Landy
Editor in Chief
Heather.Landy@SourceMedia.com
