Tom Glocer and Goldman Sachs

Tom Glocer seemed to complicate the question of Reuters' institutional ambivalence with a post on his personal blog in which he inveighed against a "rush to judgment" about financial giant Goldman Sachs after the SEC slapped the Wall Street behemoth with a civil fraud complaint. He states an obvious fact: Goldman is guilty of nothing until the company is found guilty of something, or agrees that it broke a rule or regulation.

Glocer was chided by the Newspaper Guild and lambasted by Michael Reupke and The New York Times wondered aloud what he was thinking. But shortly thereafter came a real object lesson into why the post may not have been the best idea: News that federal prosecutors are now investigating the company prompted a rush to judgment on Wall Street as investors shot Goldman shares down 10% to a nine-month low.

Ironically, Glocer's message was probably not directed at the markets, whose amorphous, amoral, extralegal and essentially unchallenged power to literally take sides at all times on anything is precisely what Reuters' business is based upon (to say nothing of the basis of the broad charge that Wall Street created or at least exacerbated the global financial meltdown).

It's great that Glocer is one of the world's few blogging CEOs despite major reasons he might think it's more trouble than it's worth: He is not only a material person who can't say certain things publicly but the head of a media company which takes extraordinary pride in its impartiality. 

A Reuters columnist making the same points in the reuters.com Analysis and Opinion section probably wouldn't have raised an eyebrow. So the problem isn't really that he's taken the side of a concept enshrined in the US Constitution but that he did so in the context of a fast-breaking story being covered aggressively by people who report up to him who already know that they aren't supposed to pre-judge anything. It doesn't help that Goldman is a major client - at the very least an inconvenient truth.

I'm inclined to think that there is nothing sinister going on, even though the atmospherics are terrible. And it's just a tad odd that Reuters' first American CEO would seem to take a stand which, if followed, would curtail free speech since he isn't steeped in the British tradition where there may be a Speaker's Corner but no First Amendment and no real sense of individual entitlement to say whatever the Hell we want to.

The Goldman story will play out for some time and there will be lots of opinions expressed about the company's comportment from all sides - including on Reuters' own blogs, where James Saft asks rhetorically: "Seriously, would you let these guys repair your car or treat your house for termites?"

And that's the point. The hue and cry of the media and masses, as iteratively informed as they are at any given moment - and even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whom Glocer singles out for excess - are not part of the process Glocer wants to protect. Unless one is to believe that the SEC will be persuaded by the likes of Jon Stewart.

[This is an abbreviated and slightly-altered version of a blog post on Planet Abell.] ■