How many readers find watching the evening news or flicking through a daily newspaper as painful an experience at the moment as a trip to see the local bank manager or dentist? Apocalyptic headlines scream out at us seemingly on an hourly basis such as 'House prices hit record lows', 'Recession confirmed' and 'Depression looms!' It's depressing reading and enough to make even the most rational members of society want to bury their head in the sand.
Now I'm not suggesting for one moment that we should try and ignore the ill wind suffocating our economy and stifling businesses, because only a fool would deny that the country faces serious problems at the moment ("ladies and gentlemen, I present Mr Gordon Brown"). However, the UK media appears to be failing in its most basic task – the responsibility to viewers, readers and listeners, to reflect what's occurring based on the facts and not put their own spin on a story or situation (and when I say "the media" I include PrintWeek in this).
I've been mulling this issue over for a good few months now but things came to a head this week when one of the UK's most popular news websites - and indeed my primary source of news - ran a significant number of stories on its business news homepage along similar lines to those apocalyptic proclamations listed above. However, at the same time, buried away at the bottom or down the side of the business homepage, were a number of headlines for what I would describe as 'good news' stories.
Yesterday, for example, high street sandwich shop chain Subway announced that it was looking to appoint 7,000 new members of staff to support its ambitious expansion plans. Around the same time fashion retailer H&M unveiled plans to employ an additional 7,000 people. Meanwhile the previous day Asda said that it was looking for 7,000 new starters (half of whom would be long-term unemployed), Sky revealed that it needed 1,000 more workers to support future growth and McDonalds revealed it needed 4,000 new recruits. Add these figures to announcements made earlier in the month by supermarket giants Sainsbury's (5,000), Waitrose (4,000), Morrisons (5,000) and Tesco (10,000), who collectively unveiled plans to employ up to 24,0000 new members of staff over the next couple of years.
Admittedly these circa 40,000 new jobs will not make much of a dent in the estimated 1.9m total UK unemployed figure. Plus a lot of these new posts are also unskilled labour whereas there have been numerous culls of skilled workers. However, it’s an interesting exercise to compare how many column, screen inches and air time these stories received, compared to coverage of the announcement at the start of the week that steel giant Corus was laying off 3,500 jobs.
The media enjoys a privileged position: people rarely question what they read in print or hear on the news and they quite rightly expect that what is reported and printed to be the truth (even Sunday Sport readers!) It's therefore imperative that the media reflect reality and not distort it. I'm not suggesting that we should collectively cast aside gloomy stories and only report feel-good news, but good news stories and bad news stories should be afforded equal amounts of column inches.
Update - The aforementioned website eventually promoted the Subway story to its news homepage. “Hoorah for small victories” you might think, but alas, as ever there is a caveat. The headline read 'New jobs at Subway amid further cuts'. Around 75% of the story was devoted to the 1,500+ jobs that had been lost that day from various different companies while a meagre 25% of screen inches were given over to Subway's 7,000 new jobs.
