It’s no fun being the scapegoat for the credit crunch. But bankers can’t worm their way out of the doghouse by foisting blame onto the media, says Ruth Sunderland, editor of Observer Business and Media:

I’ve turned into a bit of a pariah. It’s not my personality - well not just that - it’s the economy, and my role in its downfall.

If asked, most people would probably blame bankers, followed by regulators and politicians for the recession- but in what passes for financial circles these days, the scapegoat du jour is the media. And no, I’m not just being sensitive.

Recently, I was a participant in a panel debate on the crunch hosted by a major consultancy firm, where I was astounded to be attacked by two of my fellow panellists for the media’s alleged shortcomings in covering the downturn, and even for making it worse. Since my assailants were a former central banker and a commercial banker, I thought they had rather more to answer for than I did. Yet the banker berated me for failing to cover good news from the business world (I’d be delighted to, if there is any) and for lacking faith (coming from a profession that betrayed the public’s trust so spectacularly, that showed real chutzpah).

These assaults were astonishing, but I was even more surprised when the audience of business people greeted them with applause, instead of rolling-eyed disbelief. A few days later, at a private equity dinner, the chairman of the British Venture Capital Association and the guest speaker Lord Mandelson, both had a dig at the media, specifically the Daily Mail, again to laughs and approval all round.

Journalists can dish it out, so we should be able to take it - and we can. But the anti-press mood does raise some serious questions about how far the media is an actor, as well as a reporter in the crunch. There appear to be three main grievances. First, financial journalists stand accused of having failed to warn of the crisis; second, of exacerbating the downturn by piling on gloom and sensationalism; and third, of painting the crunch as a crude morality tale rather than exploring the underlying causes, with bankers like Sir Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin cast as pantomime villains.

On the first count, the business press, would, I think, have to plead guilty, though with some mitigating circumstances. Journalists were not critical enough about the sustainability of the boom and mostly did not foresee the extent of the cataclysm. We were, however, not alone in this: others, who were far better placed to predict the collapse, also failed to do so, including regulators, auditors and non-executive directors, all of whom had access to detailed internal figures and management information that journalists would struggle to obtain.

Is the media making the crunch worse? The pat answer would be that it would be hard for us to do so, given the fabulous job our financial institutions have done all by themselves. There are, though, some valid questions about the balance to be struck between the freedom of the press to report and deliver opinion, and the possible risks to the financial system in times of crisis. By and large, the mainstream media has behaved pretty responsibly. At least one newspaper held back information that could have further destabilised Northern Rock after the initial run on the bank, at the request of the authorities. Similarly, the press, when reporting the bear raids on HBOS last spring, was at pains to avoid fuelling a self-fulfilling prophecy and bringing the bank down - though as it later turned out, the short-sellers had a point. It obviously is not helpful to our central bankers for some papers to compare the Bank of England’s quantitative easing with the hyper-inflationary policies of Weimar Germany or Zimbabwe, but should they be banned from doing so? I think not.

Part of the tension is that business people tend to be natural optimists and journalists are hard-wired sceptics. The urge to blame the press for the whole thing is understandable, but in my view, wrong-headed and even dangerous. Scapegoating of any kind is simplistic and unhelpful: bankers cannot expect the media to stop heaping them with blame if they are shovelling out opprobrium themselves in the opposite direction. Attacking the media over its role in the crunch is a sideshow and a smokescreen, and the public can see through it.

Journalists, like traffic wardens, are not always popular, but people are smart enough to know that neither are culpable for the crunch.

There are complex technical reasons behind the systemic failure, but ultimately it is a morality tale: a crisis of trust. If that trust is to be rebuilt between banks and their stakeholders, there will have to be honest  communication and acceptance of responsiblity. The media can help achieve that, but not if we are at the wrong end of a puerile blaming game.

See more from Ruth Sunderland