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INTERTANKO ATHENS TANKER EVENT
Shipping and the Press: Image and Reality
Nigel Lowry
Lloyd’s List
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank you to Intertanko for the opportunity to address you today, even though the subject is a very tricky one.
I will try my best to help with some candid comments.
As I have heard it said many times, I imagine that most people in shipping, including this audience, believe that the industry gets a bad rap.
Shippingin recent years has awoken from its slumber and become concerned about its image primarily because this is seen as influencing the reaction of legislators to accidents, past and future.
I don’t think there is much doubt on the one hand that accidents and spills are the prime cause of any negative feelings out there about the tanker industry.
I don’t think there is much doubt either that accidents have driven most of the new rules, policing initiatives and harsher penalties applied to the industry in recent years.
This has already been acknowledged by speaker after speaker at this conference.
An interesting question, though, is whether accidents by themselves are the only cause of your public relations woes.
I submit that when accidents drag the industry into the limelight other factors also contribute - such as the lack of any alternative image of the industry to sustain it in those moments of trial.
In some cases I thinka role is played by less-than-transparent ownership structures that can never be explained to the satisfaction of the public.Another factor that may enter the equation is the handling of such incidents on the spot by the owner-operator, by which I mean – often enough – their no-show.
This in turn means that the ship – if it truly can be defended – is denied the possibility of the most convincing defence, while the search for a scapegoat inevitably widens and widens until it throws its net over the tanker industry as a whole.
Perception and reality – it’s a slippery subject.
Because accidents are at one and the same time the main reason for the industry’s allegedly poor image as well as to blame for bringing down the wrath of legislators, it is sometimes argued that tankers have simply been punished because the industry is misunderstood.
But for the sake of good order we need to recognize that accidents are generally facts, even if the precise causes are disputed.
A case might be made that they are taken out of context, although I am not sure this entirely stands up to scrutiny. Perhaps it’s time to take on board the idea that it’s just a case of society, through its rule-makers, deciding that such accidents are no longer tolerable. In fact I think the tanker industry, largely through Intertanko, has taken impressive steps towards accepting this culture of zero tolerance.
Nevertheless in my experience, the industry does have a little bit of a persecution complex and this is evident in a variety of ways.
Many, though perhaps not all of you, tend to put the blame on the evil media for distorting the true picture of tanker shipping, or on cynical politicians for cooking up unreasonable assaults on the industry.
Perhaps sometimes the smoldering sense of injustice is not entirely without justification.
But I do believe that often this is simplistic and exaggerated, exactly the faults you ascribe to media coverage and the public reaction. I know for a fact that there are still tanker owners who feel that to report certain incidents at all, even in the maritime press, is evidence of an agenda against them personally, and others who are certain that even the most innocent and foolish reporters’ mistakes are actually intentional acts in a conspiracy of disinformation.
In my experience this is rarely – if ever – true.
It shows a lack of sophistication in understanding how the press works, and in the admittedly difficult to explain process by which media coverage, public opinion and political initiatives interact – when they do. In particular it continues to deny the lesser or greater role that reality plays in forming perceptions.
To turn to the media, I am not here to say that we always do a great job – far from it.
I think the media does an essential job overall, often under the burden of intolerable pressure and hostile conditions. Oops, if anyone walked in in the middle of that sentence, perhaps they thought I was referring to – well, shipping.
What I would urge you to appreciate in order to look at this subject without blinkers is that shipping is not alone in feeling it gets a bad rap from the press or in linking this to the sense of having a poor public image. Government, politicians and celebrities who are hounded, scandalized church orders, immigrant communities, Camilla Parker Bowles – to name just a few; many sectors and individuals feel they have been made the target of exaggerated criticism or vilification in the media.
Heck, the media itself has an awfully lowly public image. Self-criticism is not popular among the media, but reflective journalists have always admitted this and wrestled with the standards and culture of their profession, just as have conscientious and honest tanker operators.
A BBC political editor Andrew Marr wrote a recent book about the press. “Remember that news is cruel”, he says. And he goes on:-
Reading the awful things that people apparently say about each other, or newspapers say about them, can be depressing. Is life really so writhing with distaste, failure and loathing? No - only in the newspapers. Acts of kindness, generosity, forgiveness and mere friendliness are hardly ever news; which is why there is a class of readers who turn their backs on newspapers and graze in the sunnier, gentler places of celebrity and women's magazines; or who obsessively trawl favourite internet sites and trusted periodicals to find news sources they feel they can trust, as they cannot trust the press.
Arguably the media itself is going through its own crisis. One only has to think of Iraq and the Weapons of Mass Destruction issue that has caused soul-searching among the press on both sides of the Atlantic. In the States, it has provoked mea culpas from news organizations that now feel they trod too lightly, swallowing lies or at least dodgy information from their politicians. In the UK, it almost brought down the BBC – ironically for its flawed methodology in trying to undermine the government line on WMD.
But what is the tanker industry’s image among the media?
Rather than just pass on some of my own opinions to you, I have tried to actually do a little work for this presentation.
I wrote to a number of editors and senior journalists in several countries to try and conduct a simple straw-poll of press attitudes to the tanker industry.
I must stress the intention was not a scientific study – first of all, I did not have the capacity or time to reach a sufficient number of people for that. The idea was simply to get a flavour of some of the attitudes out there. Secondly I am here as a journalist so I only gave my chosen newspapers and magazines 48 hours to reply. That did not seem unfair, though, as we ourselves always want to reach the chief executive and get our comments from you same-day!
Lastly, I encouraged one-word replies – or ‘gut feelings’ if you like – although respondents were welcome to elaborate if they wished.
These were not shipping publications. But there was a bias towards so-called serious newspapers rather than tabloid type papers, and general business journals which might be assumed not anti-industry per se.
Now the results.
Don’t expect percentages and analysis – as I said this was not a scientific survey.
But furthermore – unsurprisingly to me –half the publications did not reply. Some politely said they were too busy, most didn’t bother.
I don’t know whether any great conclusion can be drawn from that – journalists are busy, replying to questionnaires is not their core business and I can’t see any reason why it would have been remotely in their interest to participate in my little exercise.
Still, the thought occurs that if it is difficult for me to approach fellow journalists, similar difficulties may be experienced by industry.
However others were kind enough to reply and I’d like to read you the response of one, which will also allow you to hear the simple questions I put.
These answers come from a journalist at a French financial newspaper:-
1. Are oil tankers a safe industry or an unsafe industry?Unsafe
2. Is the tanker industry’s safety record likely to be superior or inferior to that of other major transportation sectors, such as air or rail?Inferior
3. Do you believe that oil tanker owners are in general environmentally-conscious, or not very environmentally conscious?Not environment conscious
4. Do you feel that the following statement is true?: ‘Oil tankers have a bad public image because of frequent pollution incidents’.Yes
5. Can you specifically recall any recent instance (within the last few years) of your publication printing a story concerning oil tankers that was not related to an accident?No
6. Do you feel that the following statement is true?: ‘Shipping is a relatively unregulated and unmonitored industry compared with shore-based enterprises’.Yes
7. By and large, do you feel that social, political, economic, cultural and other institutions and activities – whether it be the church, a political party, a sport or an industry – “get the press they deserve” most of the time?No
As a final point, I encouraged respondents to add any other comments – or simply phrases or adjectives – that truthfully summed up their personal ‘image’ of the tanker industry, but this particular journalist did not offer anything further.
What does this mean? That a report by this writer about a maritime accident will be biased and vicious? Not necessarily. That this publication will have a policy of putting a negative slant on all reports related to tankers? No again. Reporting is too complex and often too erratic a process to draw such conclusions.
But obviously if the media starts off with such a negative set of impressions, it increases the likelihood that reporting – if and when a story arises – may be negatively coloured.
I am afraid this was more or less the toneof the majority of the replies. Even when there was some allowance that the industry is getting safer, the journalists were still convinced you are not a very environmentally conscious lot, and had the impression shipping is fairly lawless compared with land-based businesses.
Reuters maritime and energy correspondent Stefano Ambrogi, who kindly gave me permission to identify him – said, quote: “A lot of crooks and shoddy operators still pervade the maritime sector… The industry is cleaning up but still has some way to go.”
Not all replies were negative.
Let me refer to one another respondent. In answer to question 1 he said tankers were “Essentially safe, but as in the case of the airline industry, when something goes wrong it becomes very attractive to the journalist.”
On the industry record compared with other transport sectors, he said: “It's not superior, but there is great social concern about these sorts of accidents that journalists can't ignore.”
About tanker owners, he replied: “Most of them are environmentally conscious, but not all”. As a final comment, the same man said he thought “the tanker industry has progressed a lot in the past few years, though this has been as a result of response to accidents and public pressure, and not exclusively because of industry initiatives.”
I bring these rather balanced replies to your attention because they came from a journalist at a newspaper in a region which suffered one of the worst modern tanker spills.
In fact, this and one rather sophisticated and quite positive set of replies from the United States, also from someone who has had experience of covering a tanker spill, made me wonder whether accidents might be part of a learning curve for reporters that will eventually introduce them to the wider realities of your industry.
I’d like to leave you with a few final thoughts.
You have not been singled out for specially harsh attention by the media. The evidence suggests rather that the industry by and large escapes the media’s attention, for good or ill.
The industry’s case for a better public image rests partly on the vital overall role shipping plays in making the world go around and hence in serving the public. It is impossible to make this case without seeming to engage the public, partly but not exclusively through the media.
I cannot mislead you by saying your message of improvement is going to be easy to get across. But I think that anyone in this room who believes the old culture of disengagement and secrecy worked better is fooling themselves.
Most of us believe that our profession, for all its flaws, serves a worthwhile overall purpose and hence is good. This is human nature – and goes for the shipping community and media alike.
With all my heart I wish you good luck in continuing to get your message across.
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