Last week Andrew Marr had a go at Sky News for being less accurate than BBC News and Current Affairs. So two days of misreporting from Newsnight gives us a good laugh.

On Thursday, BBC Newsnight reported that the “Dow Jones was substantially down amidst more credit crunch fears”. That inaccurate insight and analysis was based on what? Based on bollocks.

It was made up. There were no credit crunch fears spooking the markets. The market was closed for the Thanksgiving day holiday. The economics editor Stephanie Flanders has ‘fessed up that it was “unforgivable and embarrassing”. Peter Barron contritely said on the Newsnight blog on Friday afternoon that it won’t happen again because they will check the U.S. market is trading. So Emily Maitlis was much more careful with Friday night’s market report:

“…the FTSE 100 share index closed up, sadly we can’t show the exact figures, um, holiday season as you know in the US, so the Dow Jones remains unchanged. Against the Euro, the currencies here, the pound up, against the dollar the pound was down. You’ll just have to take my word for it. We’ll get you some figures by Monday.”

The market was actually open and up 181 points closing at 12,981 (according to Sky News). So did they actually check the market was trading? Doh! Can they get it right tonight or will it be three days in a row?

Hat-tip : Biased BBC

UPDATE : Newsnight editor Peter Barron responds “I despair! We are having a complete revision of the way we collect and check the markets information.” The producer of that piece protests (anonymously) that s/he didn’t make it up. S/he just copied it wrongly from the BBC’s business wire. Guido’s advice : first check what they say on Sky News.