Wednesday’s scenes of motorists queuing up for fuel in tailbacks stretching for hundreds of metres might have given the impression that Malta was either heading for war or that the supply of world oil had dried up for good.

It was quite pitiful to see actually and many people in the street likened the situation to when the people of Malta and Gozo totally cleared out supermarket shelves when the first Gulf War came about.

Yes, we are a nation of hoarders, and yes we also panic, in fact, any rumour of anything is much akin to saying ‘boo to a goose’ in this country. But where does the responsibility lie?

Many would first point the fingers to a local Maltese language daily for spreading the rumour that petrol station owners were to go on strike imminently (on Wednesday). We would have to tend to agree, but there is another element to it as well. Let us take the first point. In any country, the media has a responsibility to report matters truthfully, honestly and without personal opinion. Yet in Malta, we have a disparity. We have two newspapers which are plain and simply party/trade union propaganda machines. Granted, they do also publish investigative stories.

Yet does Wednesday’s fiasco qualify as a well researched investigative news story? One would have to say no, it was not. Newspapers, no matter what their creed or political allegiance should never mislead the public. One understands that even the best journalists can be fed the wrong information, it happens. But when a story sends a whole country into freefall, then there is clearly something wrong. Not only were individuals inconvenienced due to the fact that they had to wait in queues for 30 minutes or more, but national productivity must have dropped as well due to the amount of people who were panicked into leaving their offices to purchase the all important ‘juice’ for their vehicles.

As we now know, the Chamber for Small and Medium Enterprises has said that there will be no form of industrial action before a general meeting is convened on Monday. So what did we have? We had a situation where a story was blown all out of proportion, leading to massive fuel queues and huge over consumption of fuel products. This means that if a strike is brought into effect, then the nation has already drained a fair amount of the fuel that is in currently in stock. Not very clever, to say the least.

Now here, the Maltese psyche is also a bit to blame. The television and radio stations repeatedly sent out news bulletins to the effect that no strike was in force, yet people did not heed them. While we understand that motorists may have had fears that they would end up without fuel for their cars, we must also say that there was a massive over reaction by the general public.

We have heard time and time again that gone are the days that the Maltese believed everything that is spoon fed to them. But gauging by Wednesday’s performance, it is safe to say that we still panic and over react.

What are the lessons to be learnt here? The media should be responsible in its reports and the general public should verify matters before jumping to conclusions.