Letter: The Mass Media is Responsible for Creating This Fuel Shortage

Published on: 28 Sep, 2021
Updated on: 28 Sep, 2021

From: Dave Middleton

In response to: Across the Borough a Similar Story – If There’s No Queue, There’s No Petrol

We can thank the mass media for creating the petrol shortage situation, particularly ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme which appears to have started all this “panic buying” by reporting that filling stations were running out of fuel, as if it was a national crisis.

In fact, it was just a few filling stations, operated by one company, BP, that had a few missed deliveries at a few locations.

All the other so-called “news” outlets, jumped on the bandwagon with the result that, instead of a few people being mildly inconvenienced by having to go to a different filling station, probably no more than a mile away, at most, in our area, we have people who are quite naturally concerned that they might run out of fuel, filling up at every opportunity and causing a massive spike in demand, with the supply chain struggling to cope.

All this is the result of the worst kind of thoughtless and sensationalist so-called “journalism”. News editors and presenters throughout the mass media, need to take a long hard look at themselves and learn some responsibility.

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