BBC News is “completely obsessed” by the agenda set by newspapers and follows the lead of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph too much, according to senior journalist Robert Peston.

The BBC’s economics editor, in a question-and-answer session after delivering the British Journalism Review Charles Wheeler lecture on Thursday evening, said he found this “most frustrating” and attributed it to a safety-first approach by programme editors.

Peston, responding to questions about how he and the BBC decided which stories mattered to audiences, said: “It’s a challenge, the issue of the herd and pandering [to it]. Technology makes it much, much easier … to know what stories matter to people.”

He added: “My entire career has been spent arguing with bosses that something they didn’t know about, or care about, mattered. Being a journalist, a lot of it is about battles.”

The former Financial Times, Sunday Telegraph and Independent journalist said he found it “most frustrating” the way BBC News “is completely obsessed by the agenda set by newspapers”.

He added: “There is slightly too much of a safety-first [attitude]. If we think the Mail and Telegraph will lead with this, we should. It’s part of the culture.”

Peston said all the different BBC News programmes had powerful editors who want to put their stamp on the output and “quite a lot of them are charismatic”.

But even so, he added: “The safest thing is to go with what the newspapers are going with, even at a time when the influence and power of newspapers is radically declining.

“People [outside of the BBC] misunderstand what a bizarre organisation it is. You have got people with titles who are powerful but they don’t get involved with the day-to-day news judgments. The BBC is not homogenous, it is an industry.”

Peston was speaking at the annual event organised by the British Journalism Review and the University of Westminster to present the Charles Wheeler award for outstanding contribution to broadcast journalism to Channel 4 News anchor Jon Snow.

In his speech, which Peston told MediaGuardian he had not cleared with James Harding, BBC director of news and current affairs, he spoke of his fears about the impact of so-called “native ads” – advertorial, or content sponsored by brands – on journalism.

“There will be no jobs for any of us if there is no way to generate profit from news,” he said. “But news that is a disguised advert, or has been tainted by commercial interests, is not worth the name.”

Peston added that even the BBC was not “immune to a trend I fear is pernicious”, referring to an interview with an executive from BBC Worldwide, who said it was inevitable that the corporation’s commercial arm would end up running native ads.

“My concern is that native ads seem to work, in a commercial sense. Take, for example, the new business news online service, Quartz. Much of its editorial is high quality,” he added. “But what really excites advertising execs and investors is the way that it is able to charge a premium for its native ads, which are – depending on your point of view – either very cleverly or very sinisterly seamlessly integrated into its news service.

“Yes the native ads are always marked. But as a reader you have to enter the website alert to their existence to be swiftly conscious that they are importantly different from the other articles on the site.”

Peston said he did not want to overstate the dangers of native ads, but was concerned about the rise of a generation of news media managers “schooled only in the etiquette of the internet, where the idea that editorial staff should be quarantined from marketing and advertising is seen as absurd.”

He added that a second related danger was that the media industry might be going too far in allowing readers to dicate content, given the amount of data and feedback now available from online audiences.

“Here I will doubtless be accused of an outdated and patronising paternalism. So let me say immediately that I am not bemoaning the advent of blogs, or Facebook, or Twitter, or of the various forms of user-generated content,” Peston said.

“But routinely I ignore what my readers tell me get their rocks off, and publish and broadcast stuff that probably seems spectacularly dull – about, for example, the technicalities of global rules for keeping banks safe and strong, which I in my paternalistic way feel I need to tell people about, because they are so important to our prosperity, and because they failed so spectacularly.

”However, in a commercial world where hits mean money, it is legitimate to fear that difficult journalism will increasingly be squeezed out by massively popular stories with headlines like ‘Bought my cat a bed in Ikea’ and ‘If farts smelt nice, would you ask for the recipe’ (these are real stories by the way).”

Peston said the BBC’s ability to decide which stories matter, independent of concerns about commerce or popularity, was perhaps “one of the best justifications for the licence fee”.

However, he conceded: “Although there is tension even here. We at the BBC look very closely at which online and broadcast stories are most popular, so that we can’t be accused of ignoring what those who fund us want.”

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