http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/10/29/cnrock129.xml
One in three Northern Rock staff face axe
Northern Rock may have to cut up to 2,000 jobs – one in three of its workforce – due to a dramatic slump in new business.
Ron Sandler, boss of newly nationalised Northern Rock, plans to slash a third of jobs [2,000] at the stricken lender in an attempt to repay its £25bn taxpayer loan within three years.
The poor status the media has in the eyes of the public is something that is widely known, satirised and passed on, like a fact of ‘idle talk’, as Heidegger called it. However, the viciousness of the media cannot truly be appreciated until one experiences it first-hand, as it were. And the Northern Rock crisis has certainly changed my perception of the media, and radically so. The alacrity with which the pressmen yearned to extort comments from the perplexed staff – who were misfortunate victims of circumstance – shocked me, as one wrong word from one of these employees – and the wrong word is precisely what a journalist will seek to latch onto and amplify – this wrong word could and almost certainly would cost that employee his or her job. His livelihood disposed of because of the rapacity of the press. The media is evil. The methods it uses in pursuit of material are an exaggeration of the effects of the ‘arms race’ of self-interest that we see everywhere in our civilisation.
On one side, we have the journalist, whose purpose is to bring news to the people. On the other side, we have the people, who endorse journalists in demanding news. That 6,000 jobs could be lost - which would exact irrevocable damage upon the economy of the North East of England, that is without doubt - is indeed a moral problem, but not morally urgent enough to invoke a moratorium on the dissemination of harmful news. After all, 'the people have a right to know', as they say. But it is not simply the 'ontological' aspect of the journalist's place in society that influences the way in which this crisis has been read to the public. Behind the journalist is the phenomenon of journalism - an industry, like any other. The purpose of this industry is to pursue its goal of reporting news. If one member of the industry refrains from reporting news, then another one will take up the task, having recognised that its competitor has voluntarily removed itself - in a manner of speaking - from the struggle for resources. Had all industry media refused to report on the situation out of a responsibility to avert crisis, then one or more of the fringe-industry 'guerrilla' media would have been provided with the platform it needed to penetrate into the mainstream and siphon off significant parts of the market share. I’m granted the example of the Drudge Report.com, which broke the story of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal after the mainstream media demurred to run it. The mainstream industry consequently raises its hackles, just as every industry and business and employee and worker does when it is threatened by the possibility of being out-matched by a competitor.
The underlying fact that was recognised by Adam Smith at the outset of capitalism is that competition creates optimum efficiency. But the intensity of competition that reiterates optimum efficiency and the subsequent need to exhaust the potential of available resources – into which bland concepts we can insert the flesh-and-blood story of the funding crisis at Northern Rock – is raised to a tragedy.
