Taskforce failing to get Voice Heard?
One thing I’ve always found interesting is how the press reports things. As an example, take the recent knife amnesty. More or less as soon as it was announced the Press Association started to report individual stabbings and all of a sudden the general public were whipped into a belief that there was a growing knife culture. In reality the number of stabbings hadn’t materially increased since the beginning of accurate records began.
I recall this because in some ways a similar sort of ’selective reporting’ has happened again today.
Let me explain. In 2005 a task force was formed by CWC and Le Bea Visage to increase the sales of income protection. Members of the task force include Prudential, Bupa, Friends Provident and Legal and General and the idea behind the movement is to counteract the falling sales of Income Protection.
As opposed to individual protection for each product bought, like taking out Mortgage Payment Protection Insurance (MPPI) against a home loan, income protection covers the total loss of all income. Up until quite recently income protection was called Permanent Health Insurance (PHI).
Today the taskforce produced a 40 page white paper outlining its views on why people weren’t buying Income Protection, why they should and laid down a nine point recovery plan of how it was going to instigate a market recovery. In the same document the task force also openly criticised the sale and profiteering of payment protection insurance.
The thing that I find interesting is that, as Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) is hot news, the newspapers (or the on-line versions at least) hardly mention the substance of the white paper and just report the PPI elements of it. For example the Guardian tells us “Taskforce demands consumer protection over PPI” and the Daily Mail says, “Task force slams PPI sales tactics”.
To quote the old adage any press coverage is good press coverage, so maybe the task force will be content, but perhaps we should remember our hunger for sensationalism will always override the fact that 95% of real news really is actually quite boring.
