Some Western oil media outlets are reporting that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has banned the entry of some correspondents of international news agencies to its headquarters in Vienna and prevented them from attending the meeting of the OPEC+ coalition of oil producers on Sunday.
The decision didn’t come out of the blue; it targets a group of correspondents with a history of premeditations, harbingers, and projections that have targeted OPEC+ for seven consecutive years.
The latest such move is the dissemination of a misleading story that wasn’t based on reliable or even known sources: it claimed that tensions between Saudi Arabia and Russia had been on the rise over oil production levels.
It’s not yet clear whether the rumour was politically or economically motivated ahead of the coalition ministers’ meeting.
OPEC’s defensive posture is no longer acceptable as oil-demonising entities have extensively exploited various media to focus public opinion and influencers on distorting the oil industry’s image.
Therefore, OPEC is working on having a professionally-qualified special media arm, capable of penetrating the ranks of the opposite party, which has always attacked oil and its producers without reliability. This party is not fighting oil as much as it is fighting the interests of consumers and their economies on the one hand and hurting the economies of producers on the other.
