A snub from a senior member of the Austrian government to a major event held in Vienna by OPEC, which is based there, has thrown the spotlight back on media coverage of the oil exporters’ organisation.
The Financial Times reported that the Austrian foreign minister, Alexander Schallenberg, refrained from attending OPEC’s set-piece eighth International Seminar held in Vienna last week after some media outlets were banned from attending by organisers.
Earlier, Reuters reported that OPEC blocked its journalists and others from Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal from the event.
Schallenberg was scheduled to speak at this global event, designed to bring together producers and consumers under the banner “Towards a Sustainable and Inclusive Energy Transition”, in one of the most important days on the global energy agenda.
The minister’s office said the decision not to attend was due to “agenda” issues, saying it had never told OPEC that he would attend and that his name had been added to the event’s schedule by mistake. But it also stressed the importance of press freedom.
The FT quoted the foreign minister’s spokesman as saying “media freedom” including “coverage of political developments,” is “the cornerstone of any democratic society”.
The lack of Austria’s participation — long a feature of OPEC’s gatherings of this kind — stood out all the more with the eighth International Seminar also the first to be held since the Covid-19 pandemic.
In an earlier Al Majalla article, I referred to the organisation’s decision to some media organisations from a different Vienna meeting – of OPEC+ – the wider alliance of oil exporters. I argued the decision was not sudden and followed a run of misleading or speculative reporting from these well-known outlets.
