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Are the banks and banking system completely at fault for
this mess? No, I don’t think they are and no, I’m not in finance and never have
been.
There’s been a worrying trend for quite some time now within
the mass media and specifically the reporting of news. News, and especially
broadcast news is treated as fact by many. You come home, turn on the news and
take the majority of what you’re told as true. This has traditionally been
correct, unlike newspapers which have been viewed as biased depending on their
ownership.
However, over recent years, news broadcasters caught in a
very competitive ratings war have moved further and further away from the
reporting of fact to the now common reporting of opinion; from the reporting of
what has happened to the reporting of what might happen. This, together with
the well known and proved adage ‘bad news sells’, should be causing major
concern.
I like many people watch the news every day. I have noticed more
and more, a trend by editors of these programmes hunt down individuals and
groups with a negative opinion on the topic in question and portraying it as
fact.
An example of this was Northern Rock. Did the media cause
the initial problem? No! However, the building society had enough assets to
cover the problem. Then the media get hold of the story and stated that the
building society was in crisis and that people would lose all their savings if
it failed. Lo and behold, the next morning, queues form to withdraw money which
causes the building society to collapse and the media to pat itself on the back
with ‘we told you so’.
This is the so called ‘self fulfilling prophecy’ effect which
has become so prevalent recently and an economic and social cancer. It forces
itself into our lives and homes, fed by the mass media and preys on our fears
by portraying a possible future as fact. Remember, this credit crunch is based
on sentiment. There’s no food shortage, no empty oil fields and no alien
invasion. The only people who gain from prolonging this misery are the news
broadcasters in there never ending ratings war.
I know everybody who reads this will think they’re
intelligent enough to know when supposition is being portrayed as fact; but do
we? When it threatens our life, our family and our homes, are we brave enough
to make that distinction. When we are told that unemployment ‘could’ top 3
million it takes a brave person to go out and buy that new car. As a result,
car sales drop, suppliers cut staff and unemployment goes up. Big smile on
broadcasters faces as they announce how right they were and hope you will
continue to watch their channel for more accurate, factual.
Take RBS. We are told on the news that the taxpayer stands
to lose nearly £400bn due to the debt we’ve underwritten. This is pure
scaremongering and not based on a shred of fact. It would take just about every
customer of RBS to default on their mortgage. They state repossessions are up
by 54% but gloss over the fact that this equates to 1 in 1100 being
repossessed; a tiny fraction.
What scares me is that almost everything we know about the
world outside our communities goes through the mass media and can be
manipulated anyway possible. There is no conspiracy here, just the continuation
of the market forces that got us into this mess to start with, but in a
different guise
Don’t get me wrong, the banks were initially to blame, but
it is now the media which will decide when this recession ends and they have never
shown any responsibility in anything they do. They honestly believe they are a
passive force for good.