The blinkered attitude of the media towards their reporting of the economic crisis continues to amaze. This item in today’s Times reports that 500 jobs are to go at the Transit plant in Southampton. The piece states:
Ford, the US car giant, today announced that it was cutting 850 British jobs as new vehicle registrations plunged by 30.9 per cent, confirming the dire state of the transport market.
Ford said today that the job cuts were in response to the “serious economic situation”, and plans to reduce staff by between 400 and 500 at its Transit van plant in Southampton. A further 350 jobs will be lost across the company.
The company is the lastest carmaker to announce job cuts after sales of new vehicles have plunged as consumers cut back on spending while the price of materials, such as steel, has soared.
The story is chock-a-block with inaccuracies and would be laughable if it wasn’t serious.
For a start, the author refers to the SMTM as pleading for help from the Government to rescue the car industry. It is the SMMT (Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders), not the SMTM.
Secondly, the Transit job losses were announced months ago and are due to production being moved to Turkey – see here. Someone who ought to have more respect for the facts (and the Southampton workforce) has chosen to dress the job losses up in a (par for the course) gloomy release about a faltering economy, regardless of the fact that the motor trade is a hive of activity; some car traders reporting their busiest January on record. New registrations are down by varying amounts for manufacturers, but the car market is about more than new sales, and not all manufacturers report a 31% fall in sales – Toyota are down just under 2% for example.
Has “the price of materials such as steel” soared? I don’t think so. This chart tracks the fall of steel prices since last year. Scrap metal to be recycled is now almost worthless and is being stockpiled at the docks. However, steel producers’ stock prices have recently made modest gains in the market as confidence begins to pick up in certain corners of the world (the Keynesian infrastructure projects will not be built without steel).
There is no doubt that there is useful economic activity happening out there. It’s not record breaking, but it is happening. High Streets may be slow, but that is probably a good thing – we’ve got to wean ourselves off conspicuous consumption. Cars are selling and house prices are picking up; the Halifax reports a 1.9 increase in prices in January. I posted a comment on that Times story about the inaccuracies and a link to the truth about Transit, pointing out that regurgitating press releases is not what journalism is supposed to be about. Did they run it? What do you think?
If the papers don’t start getting with the programme, and reporting some of the good news that is out there, they will find themselves increasingly alien to the readership, and presumably what few advertisers they still have too. Maybe that will also be a good thing. Down with newspaper bailouts!
