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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

But the point of the article is that the MOD is trying to cut costs. The takehome wage of Ms Ferguson is irrelevant, she is still costing the MOD £2k/day.

IMO there is a reasonable story here: is the ministry really saving much money by laying off staff and then, as a result, being forced to bring in contractors at much higher costs?

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If they bring in permanent staff to fill a short term role and lay them off as soon as they find the right person, that will cost a lot of money. Layoffs aren't cheap in the UK, even in the private sector.

When you pay a lot of money for a contractor, part of what you are paying for is the right to get rid of them easily.

The Guardian has an agenda, and they routinely misinterpret things to sell news.

They're the "daily mail" of the left. Happily, judging by their circulation figures, they won't be around too much longer.

I wouldn't quite go that far. While The Guardian drives me nuts sometimes, especially regarding UK politics, it's markedly less nakedly evil than the Daily Mail. See the recent NSA revelations for good, high-quality, pushing-the-boundaries journalism, which we'd all miss were it gone.

Everything is less evil than the Daily Mail so that's not much of a comparison.

I've given up reading the news in the UK. It's either biased towards the agenda of the paper or terribly depressing. Both unfortunately sell very well. I've even got rid of my television. Life is good.

I guess. Though I'd argue that the UK's media outlets are actually among the least consistently unusable. At least for bare-bones here-are-the-facts reporting, the BBC is pretty useful.

In any case, I don't know how feasible it is to have a "non-biased" newspaper that pushes actual journalism.

The BBC however have very selective reporting.

It probably isn't. I was hoping WikiNews would end up being that to be honest.

The BBC is pretty left leaning. I expect the vast majority of BBC workers read the Guardian.

The BBC is accused of being left-leaning by right-wingers, and right-leaning by left-wingers. I suspect you're right, and it's slightly left-leaning in practice, and I'd argue that this reflects reality.

So they published stolen state secrets, and put people in danger. Yay them!

Makes 'phone hacking' seem lame in comparison.

It's substantially more complex than that, and you know it. Don't trivialise an important issue.

Just a touch more evidence based than the DM, but anyone who is in the business of selling news a) has an agenda and b) need to sell their stories, so quelle surprise.

I think the reason The Guardian is interesting is because they don't really need to sell their stories.

They happily make millions of pounds of losses each year, and are bankrolled by people who seem to not mind.

They are not driven by profit, they're driven by a moral crusade (A mistaken one IMHO, but still).

The Guardian is funded by a trust. It is losing money but the circulation figures mean little: Print is dead.

It's funded by sales from some other profitable less biased papers/magazines.

Losses after losses... at some point, something's gotta give.

"Funded by a trust" isn't some magic get out of jail free card.

Circulation figures for other newspapers are doing pretty well actually. Print still has a long life ahead.

Not really. Only tangentially.

Unless the claim is that the Ministry of Defense laid off their CIO - which is the role she’s playing. They’re just in the process of looking for a new one, which doesn’t happen overnight.

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