The 24-hour rolling news syndrome

Sometimes campaigns like that ABAP’s Staff Travel Working Group is engaged on seem to have lost momentum, to be drifting or be losing direction. It is what can be called the 24 hour rolling news syndrome. In this syndrome a relationship is formed between the ease or speed of communication and the need for news to fill the space created by that speed. Radio 5 in the UK is probably the classic example.

Created effectively on Radio 4 FM during the first Gulf war, the end of that conflict showed the problem in stark reality and were the BBC not publicly funded but had to earn its revenues there is little doubt that Radio 5 would never have existed. In fact, once the conflict was finished most people were content to return to their traditional news sources but the BBC decided that it would extend its taxpayer-funded empire and established a permanent 24-hour, rolling news station on AM, taking over frequencies formerly used by regional radio services. At once it was clear that without a war to report by the minute, news itself was not enough to hold the listener and Radio 5 added sport, and longer interviews. Ten years later the extent to which it has failed in its original brief is evidenced by the continued existence of news services on all the remaining radio channels.

In our case the syndrome manifests itself by creating in the minds of our supporters the idea that absence of news means absence of action or even worse. The truth isn’t like that at all, but is simply that some things take longer to happen than others. In the BBC Radio 5 equivalent, we’ve reached a lull in the conflict; in reality we are waiting for results from our legal advisers.

And in our case this process is made slower still by the proper need to finance our activities separately from the main ABAP financial resources. Whereas a large commercial firm could simply seek a legal opinion and deal with the costs later, we have to establish absolute costs before the event to ensure that we don’t spend what we don’t have.

That in turn is why the campaign to raise funds by individual contributions continues with such importance.

Evidence that we may be having some effect on British Airways management comes from the number of people who took your writer aside at the event reported below and to various degrees conveyed advice or straightforward threats that he should abandon this campaign. Various penalties were suggested. More significantly, none of those issuing the advice/threat was prepared to be named. Frankly, like spoiled ballot papers, such views or threats don’t count. Furthermore I reiterate my invitation to publish on my blog the views of anyone wishing to offer their point of view. Any such views will either be published in full or not published at all and this will only occur if they are deemed by my legal advisor to result in legal liability. Furthermore, the medium through which the blog is published (Blogspot) does not permit amendment of the comments submitted ie they cannot be censored.

The additional news I can publish is that Dayne Markham and your writer were invited to speak recently at a luncheon of former senior BOAC managers and board members - and informally meet with some equivalent former BEA colleagues lunching at the same time in the same place. We summarised the campaign to date and Dayne explained why ABAP’s Committee felt that while the Staff Travel issue clearly falls within the competence and limits of ABAP’s constitution, it was necessary to draw a distinction between ABAP’s ongoing negotiations with BA Pensions and the Working Group’s campaign to even start negotiating with BA over the Staff Travel issue. All our presentations, both formal and informal were warmly received, generally supported in the same way that support has been throughout ie in relation to the extent to which individuals are affected by the proposed changes.

The meetings did produce some specific contacts which the ABAP Working Group will be pursuing urgently and the results of those efforts will be reported here in due course.

Inevitably there is a minority view that all this isn’t worth the candle, that questioning and seeking to change the mind of a powerful and worldwide company is a futile waste of time; some ludicrously continue to suggest that this is driven by individual grudge. The last point is so stupid that comment is almost unnecessary; suffice to say that here and in the blog the writer has consistently said that the issue is not about personalities but about unfairness. They cite our recognition that we may not succeed as a reason not to try. That these same people once led BOAC and BEA through some extraordinarily difficult times both operationally and financially with tenacity and wisdom can only suggest that there may truly be no country for old men, or certainly for old brains. For our part it is enough to reiterate the caution to those opposing our (futile) objectives in British Airways that the adversary who has nothing to lose is a dangerous adversary indeed.

This item is also appearing in the news section of the ABAP website.