Blame the media

I think we can safely all agree that the recent petrol panic-buying fiasco was the fault of The Media. Not any specific part of it, but all of it from the BBC news bulletins to humble little blogs like this one. Definitely not to blame is Boris Johnson’s clown-car government which did not prepare for the petrol crisis, despite the entire road haulage industry warning that this was going to happen for years, definitely not the Brexit elephant in the room and certainly not car drivers who went on a mass panic when a few fuel stations started to run dry.

To be fair, some of the newspaper reporting has been hysterical. Take my own local newspaper, the Bristol Post – PLEASE. Like most provincial newspapers, almost no one buys it these days, so its effect on public opinion and behaviour will be minimal. It has an online presence to the extent that everything on it clickbait. It thrives on what we in the trade call bollocks, with headlines like “Why is everyone in Bristol panicking about petrol shortages?” when everyone isn’t. I don’t see too much of the red top newspapers – I have a conventional toilet paper supplier so don’t require one – so I assume their headlines have also been along those lines. Okay, fair enough. But even the hateful Mail and Sun sell less than a million copies each these days. That can’t be enough people to bring petrol stations to their knees, can it?

For my news, I watch and listen to the BBC and Sky and I have heard no media hysteria, but here’s a thing. Some folk are being critical of fuel shortages even being reported. Apparently, if you report on something, you are the source of the panic. Why can’t we be more like North Korea? Because that’s the alternative. And anyway, when people go onto social media to have a pop at panicking motorists, aren’t they too guilty of causing panic?

Judging from my limited travels around Bristol today, petrol stations are back to normal. Stocks of petrol are unchanged but people have stopped topping up their fuel tanks when they don’t need to. For the time being, the panic is over. Next, it will probably be turkeys or pigs in blankets that will be in short supply as we start to run low on stuff in the run-up to Christmas and of course that will be the media’s fault too. Because if we are losing our minds panicking, it’s important always to blame someone else.