Surviving Recessions – The Media’s Responsiblity

The BBC have run a story about AE Harris, a Birmingham company that have survived an amazing 10 downturns, including recessions and even the great depression.

The company started 128 years ago making Jewellery and now made laser cutting and tool making equipment and software.

Company Chairman, Russel Luckork said “I sincerely hope that I will not have to reduce my workforce this time and I will be fighting tooth and nail to make sure that doesn’t happen. I think we have enough irons in the fires with our customers to make sure that we keep all our people in employment.

I don’t believe that it will be a deep recession, I think it will be a shallow but I think there’s a danger of talking ourselves into a deeper recession.”  “My advice to companies that are struggling at the moment is to draw in your horns. You have to cut salaries, remuneration and costs. However ruthless it may seem you have to stay in business. The good times will come again. In my experience when there have been bad times, there have always been good and very lucrative times just round the corner. You just have to survive and stay patient”

Russell story highlights a number of important points.  In the recessions and even depressions up until the 1970’s most people got their news from either the daily newspaper, a daily edition of the news on the television, or maybe both.  Meaning that the news that was reported had happened, usually the previous day.  The 1980’s brought with it the “news updates”, and satellite feeds,  which meant that news was reported as it was happening.  Most people will remember the Iranian Embassy Seige as the turning point for the “live” reporting. 

Now we have 24 hour news channels, that have 24 hours to fill with news each day. And this means that the media now fill most of this with speculation.  They no longer report on the press release that has been made, but instead discuss, speculate and even interrogate people on the expected contents.

We will all have known about stories & situations where the media only reports the negative, the doom and gloom, and Russells fears that the media may worsen the recession through continued negative reporting is a very real risk.

Markets are volatile things, as is business confidence, and that is just the key to it all – confidence.  Businesses, investors, buyers, employees need to be able to build up that confidence, that things will get better, that things are getting better, and so we need a media that can bring confidence and good news back into the arena.

The media will argue that they report what people want to hear, so do we really want to hear only the doom and gloom stories.  Some news stations have been running “redundancy totalisers” this week, to show the numbers of jobs lost.  Can we lobby these stations into running the same kind of stories when the economy starts to pick up again?

Fantasy Couriers has commissioned a poll of UK small business to find out what the real situation is, is it all as bleak as the Media are portraying, or is it just that old chestnut that bad news sells more copies than good news.

We will keep you updated.