May/June 2002

POSTCARD FROM VIENNA
Covering OPEC is
A Contact Sport

BY BRUCE STANLEY

Several times each year an unseemly spectacle erupts amid the chandeliers and cigar smoke of Vienna’s finest hotels. Leaders of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries gather to reassess their output quotas for crude oil at OPEC headquarters in the Austrian capital. As they arrive individually, petroleum paparazzi ambush them in the lobbies of their favorite hotels. When it comes to pack journalism, film stars and celebrity athletes have nothing on OPEC oil ministers.

On March 15, for example, at Vienna’s Hotel Intercontinental — preferred by the Iranian oil minister, Bijan Zangeneh, and his counterparts from Iraq and Libya — the tranquil hotel lobby transformed into a journalistic mosh pit whenever a black Mercedes glided up to the front door. Each arriving minister stepped into a briar patch of cameras, tape recorders, and outstretched cellular phones with lines already open to editors poised at keyboards in London and New York. Reporters bayed for sound bites about OPEC’s expected decision, as the ministers, cocooned by bodyguards and engulfed by the rabble, struggled toward the refuge of hotel elevators. Latecomers vaulted over coffee tables to elbow closer for crumbs of information.

With the Middle East exploding in violence, with Saddam Hussein using a petroleum cutoff as a weapon and Iran threatening to follow suit, with Venezuela in turmoil, and with the world’s major economies laboring to shake off a recession, the price of oil is attracting intense scrutiny from the media. When OPEC — which pumps a third of the world’s crude oil — decides to loosen or tighten its taps, the impact ripples throughout the global economy.

OPEC’s eleven member countries — from Algeria to Venezuela — are a diverse lot, united by little more than a shared interest in maximizing earnings from oil. Their ministers have been meeting more frequently — seven times in 2001 — as they’ve tried to micromanage production. Dow Jones, Bloomberg, and other financial news agencies cover these meetings routinely, as do more general news outlets, including The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and CNN. Some eighty media representatives and energy analysts covered the March meeting, in spite of its predictable outcome. More contentious meetings can attract twice that number.

QUOTE STALKING
For those who report these events, the assignment can combine the spontaneity of a riot with the physical rigors of rugby. “We’ve had furniture broken, jewelry display cases smashed, people thrown against the wall, bits of chandeliers knocked down by boom microphones. It’s the accepted protocol of this thing,” says David Bird of Dow Jones.

OPEC madness strikes in two phases. In the first, oil ministers shuttle to and from their hotel suites for small-scale talks before they meet en masse. Wire service reporters specializing in energy coverage do their best to intercept them because every ministerial utterance is a potential scoop. A single quote — “one million barrels” or “$25 a barrel,” for example — can become an urgent headline.
Formal, organized access to the ministers is nonexistent, so any appearance by a minister, even if he’s just on his way to go shopping, can trigger an athletic scrum. “Unless you’re quick on your feet or built like a refrigerator, it can be very difficult to talk with these people,” says David Buchan of the Financial Times.

Several news organizations operate in teams of four or more reporters to stake out lobbies, corridors, and even parking garages of the hotels where most ministers stay. Their tactics have an almost military flavor. Reuters reporters even use walkie-talkies. Bird once hid in a hotel linen closet and waylaid oil ministers walking past to confirm their tentative decision on output.

The second, climactic phase of OPEC coverage is a frantic, five-minute “gang bang” at the OPEC Secretariat building, just before the ministers meet to rubber-stamp the informal agreement they’ve already reached in their earlier talks. Two floors below, journalists cluster behind a barrier like cattle in a feedlot, awaiting the signal to charge up the stairs for the mass encounter. This is their only opportunity for interviews with all the ministers, who sit together around a long, U-shaped conference table.

War whoops echo up the stairwell as the pack advances, tripping on steps and maneuvering to block competitors from squeezing past. Journalists and photographers storm into the narrow gap of the U-shaped table and within seconds coalesce in a sweaty throng. Reporters cluster three-deep in front of key ministers, such as Saudi Arabia’s Ali Naimi and Iran’s Zangeneh, groping for space through which to thrust a microphone or recorder. TV cameramen swing their equipment like battering rams, but movement is almost impossible.

The maelstrom adds to what already is a surrealistic diplomatic forum. According to OPEC protocol, delegates sit in the alphabetical order of the countries they represent. That means Zangeneh of Iran rubs shoulders with the Iraqi oil minister, who sits in icy proximity to his Kuwaiti counterpart. After the interviews, the press retreats to a windowless bunker on the ground floor to await a briefing when the meeting ends. The wait could last a few hours, or stretch into the following day.

Ministers seem to enjoy the show. “This is the beauty of the game,” says Kuwait’s Ahmad Fahad al-Ahmad al-Sabah. Some press members are less enthralled. “This could very easily be organized in an orderly fashion, but they don’t do that because they enjoy controlling us,” says Dean Acosta of Energy News Live, a Web service based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “They love to create the hysteria. It’s almost like professional boxing promotions.”

IN THE BUBBLE
The formal briefing, when it happens, is almost always anticlimactic because reporters already have confirmed the informal decision during the gang-bang upstairs and fired off a salvo of stories with headlines like iran, libya, uae say opec to leave oil output target intact.

The reporting rites at these meetings have evolved from the days when the OPEC press corps comprised half a dozen reporters who enjoyed easy access to the ministers. James Tanner, a retired Wall Street Journal reporter, recalls how in the early 1970s he and the Saudi oil minister rode together in the minister’s car to the meeting. When it ended, Iran’s minister gave Tanner a lift back to the hotel. That era ended in 1975, when terrorists led by Carlos “The Jackal” kidnapped the OPEC ministers in Vienna and flew them to Algeria before releasing them. Today, Austrian police armed with assault rifles guard the ministers’ hotels. Although few of the ministers hail from countries renowned for a free press, they are growing accustomed to the media’s demands as they meet more often. “They’ve become a little less afraid of us,” says Eithne Treanor, a reporter for CNBC. “We certainly would not have gotten a live television interview three years ago.”

The many hours reporters and analysts spend talking among themselves — inside their bubbles in hotel lobbies and at the OPEC press bunker — do raise a question about the originality of what gets reported. The idiosyncratic rituals of reporting at OPEC meetings can, in fact, lead to a homogenization of the news. Bhushan Bahree of The Wall Street Journal says he’s considered the problem, but prefers the current system of homogenization to having “some p.r. person inside OPEC homogenizing the news for us.”

The Houston-based energy analyst Bill Edwards argues that reporters invariably reach a consensus about what is likely to happen at each meeting. OPEC ministers monitor their reports, he says, and use them as a guide in setting their output quotas. So this unruly press corps, Edwards maintains, has a hand in directing world oil policy.

Bruce Stanley reports about energy and European business for The Associated Press. He is based in London..