There's no good news, Bob

I was slightly bemused by the speech of Bob Dudley, chief executive of BP, to UK business leaders at the CBI conference yesterday.

Dudley, in an attack on the world’s media, said: ’Over 87 days as the oil kept flowing into the ocean, it frequently felt as if we were the only story on the news, 24/7. I have seen figures that in some months fully 30 per cent of the 24-hour news coverage was devoted to the incident.’ He added: ’I watched graphic projections of oil swirling around the gulf, around Florida, across and around Bermuda to England - these appeared authoritative and inevitable. The public fear was everywhere.’

The key phrase to mull over here is ’over 87 days as the oil kept flowing into the ocean’. Dudley’s recognition of this basic fact might have convinced him that there was not much chance of a ’good news’ angle on this particular event.

However, a company such as BP is usually coddled by the warm, fuzzy glow of its own PR operations, which makes it feel as if it is somehow immune to bad news. And this feeds back into the news coverage from the wider media. Confronted as it is by the relentless ’official’ optimism of professional PR operations, when disaster does strike, the media are only too happy to wallow in a veritable tide of doom and gloom.

There is a debate to be had over the sensationalism of the media (remember that ’swine flu’ that was about to kill everyone?) but companies such as BP might find some of the buck resting rather near to home.