Who is to blame for panic-buying at the pumps?
Raymond Snoddy looks at those in the line of fire, accused of causing wide-spread alarm and a run on petrol
When faced with fuel shortages and queues around the block outside petrol stations, former business secretary Dame Andrea Leadsom had absolutely no doubt who was to blame.
She told Nick Ferrari on LBC that the media was responsible for several days of panic-buying of fuel.
By way of contrast, Dame Leadsom said that unlike the media, government ministers had been absolutely measured in their comments about the crisis.
Ferrari snapped back that “the media is not in charge of lorries.”
Unsurprisingly, Andrew Bridgen MP, from the extreme Brexit wing of the Conservative Party has also been arguing that this has been “totally a media fuelled panic-buying.”
In fact cynics might say Ministers, who have not so much trust left in the bank, helped to create the panic by insisting, there was no need to panic.
You can hear similar arguments about the role of the media on talk shows up and down the land and indeed uttered with absolute, unquestioned certainty by otherwise intelligent friends and acquaintances.
It’s all a story that has been ramped up by the media in order to get ratings and circulation, apparently.
In this argument, television is the most culpable of all because it is so powerful at triggering an emotional response by showing taped-off petrol stations where the fuel has run-out and endless queues where it has not.
A more sophisticated version of the argument came from professor Steven Reicher, a St Andrews social psychologist.
“By concentrating on the exceptional you (the media) make the exceptional the rule,” Reicher told Radio 4’s Today programme, although he acknowledged that he knew, that was in general what the media did.
The good professor suggested that the way in which the media could help to avoid provoking panic buying would be to also show more “mundane” pictures of perfectly normal motorists filling up normally at open and well-supplied filling stations.
Nice idea but somehow it’s unlikely to catch-on with news editors- whatever the medium- and it may just smack of propaganda.
We are into historic territory here, everything from blaming the messenger for the message, to the exceptionalism of journalism- as prof Reicher notes – always picking out and highlighting the unusual.
This goes all the way back to the man bites dog theory of journalism. But apart from the tendency of politicians to find someone else to blame for their own failings, has the media a charge to answer in the case of the evaporating fuel?
We need to know given that the UK has already suffered toilet roll hoarding because of Covid, empty supermarket shelves, and missing carbon dioxide, with missing chickens and turkeys to come in the run-up to Christmas.
Reporting shortages of almost anything will inevitably trigger a surge in demand that may be less of a “panic” than a rational response by the individual to get their share of a scarce resource.
In that simplistic sense, the media is guilty because if no-one had reported problems with a shortage of fuel tanker drivers then almost by definition, drivers would not have known to rush-off to their nearest filling station.
In the real world, the argument doesn’t stack up for a second.
It is not the job of the media to suppress information but to report facts as they find them. Can you think what opprobrium would be poured over the BBC – or any broadcaster – if stories were withheld deliberately to prevent panic-buying.
Even if you wanted to, the stories would inevitably seep out anyway, probably in a more exaggerated form.
And that’s before we get to the role of social media which, compared to the last time in 2000, has vastly speeded up the spread of information.
In the petrol panic, the arrival of a tanker is revealed on social media and hordes descend immediately like vultures.
We start getting closer to the real culprits when the Mail on Sunday quoted unnamed ministers accusing “a former BBC boss” and “a diehard Remainer” of selectively leaking remarks made by a BP executive at a private Government meeting.
Rod McKenzie was obviously a key suspect because he ran Radio1’s Newsbeat programme for 20 years before becoming managing director of policy at the Road Haulage Association.
The story was nonsense. McKenzie denies leaking the petrol shortage comments and insisted he had not even been at the meeting in question.
It is however, a powerful example of how far the MoS will go in an attempt to smear the BBC by proxy and try to take down a “diehard Remainer” at the same time.
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Kevin Maguire, associate editor of the Daily Mirror, was closer to the mark when he asked where Prime Minister Boris Johnson was during the crisis and why he wasn’t holding press conferences in his new £2.6 million suite to explain Government plans to deal with the issue.
The Sun accused the Government – the Government it has supported – of being asleep at the wheel while confusing drivers with U-turns – Call in the Army, Don’t Call in the Army, Panic, Don’t panic and Bury Head in Sand.
In its editorial, The Sun asks if anyone is actually in charge in Downing Street?
“Is there a proper strategy for quelling the petrol panic? For ending the insane queues, the forecourt fist fights, the siphoning of petrol from parked cars? For getting stranded key workers to their hospitals, care homes or school? There isn’t one. Merely a hope that it will all just go away in the end,” the paper argues.
Meanwhile, the French have not pulled their punches on a more likely cause of the problem than the media.
Michel Barnier, the former chief EU negotiator says quite simply, the driver shortage “is a direct consequence of Brexit,” while the French European Affairs Minister, Clement Beaune noted “every day we can see the intellectual fraud that is Brexit.”
More practically, the head of the Polish lorry drivers union says he does not believe his members will be taking up the 5,000 temporary UK visas, which last only until Christmas Eve. They left because of “abuse and red tape” and will not be coming back.
With more shortages to come in an intricate, interconnected economy, the media should continue to serve its audiences by unflinchingly reporting not just on shortages wherever they occur, but also the causes of those shortages.