When I read that the Prime Minister had addressed the Ninth Annual Conference of the Tumas Foundation for Education in Journalism exhorting journalists old and young to seek the truth rather than sensationalism and to focus on news rather than personalities, I smirked in admiration. It takes long, arduous practice for a man like him to say a thing like that and keep a straight face. Could his audience, old hacks and starry eyed aspirants as they may have been, have failed to notice that he is the boss as far as the PN media empire is concerned? They must have found it an inspiring performance. If they managed neither to laugh nor to cry it was because they’d had a stunning lesson in the measurement of the distance between rhetoric and reality.
Amazingly, Lino Spiteri, writing on the issue of ethics in journalism, mentions the incident and takes it at face value. He also mentions a report presented to the Leader of the Opposition by a group of experts selected by him reviewing this landscape. That too is indicated as a bright hope: the selected experts apparently emphasised sound ethics.
Still, Spiteri nears the core of the problem when he writes that “the largely unethical state of much of our journalism is the fault of the political media in our midst”. But then he loses it again when he is comforted by the fact that “in recent months there has been some easing off in personal attacks.”
Nothing is getting better. Not really. The easing off is part of the inevitable cycle. Who could stand the vitriol spewed at election time at full dose between elections? The easing off is a respite in order to make the next season of paroxysms more effective. It is part of the options array of the power-mongers. At election time, along with opinion surveys and professionally designed public media campaigns directed at the general public we have docked news items, and items suppressed. We have supposedly independent opinion writers who, at the right moment, become far more violent in their language than their political masters would ever allow themselves to be. The whole circus comes to town.
In between elections the same writers criticise their masters on side issues and irrelevances in order to regain the camouflage of independence so necessary to ambush the unsuspecting when the time is right once more.
It would be legitimate to claim that a trend has changed if, at the next election, we have no instance of character assassination, no absurd perversion of the facts in news items and no case of well timed fabrication.
My reading of the situation is that matters are getting worse not better, but we will only find out for sure in four years’ time. Will we plumb new depths at the next general election? There is no way of guessing at this time and other elections are not a reliable gauge. Local elections and European elections have their own codes: the traffic will allow less, the hysteria is absent and the backstabbing has to be done with greater stealth.
The all-or-nothing stakes in a general election make all the difference. All the stops are pulled and we discover what everybody is made of, who loses his head first and who disgraces herself by stepping beyond the pale of common decency. In those extraordinary circumstances we discover the reality around us which is clothed in a false normality most of the time. The raging fit we experience every five years tells us where we are and where we are going. The structure of our predicament is revealed in a flash that lasts a week or two.
If there were more than just two political parties with a fighting chance of success in Maltese politics, things would be different. There would still be ethical issues for journalists and excesses are committed everywhere no matter the political scenario but our all-or-nothing, one-winner-takes-all configuration raises the stakes too high, polarises in a structural manner and leaves no space for other opinions, no nuances, just black and white, truth and lie; no innocent bystanders and no honest brokers.
When politics is not the problem, it is the money and the two are closely linked. If the overwhelming influence of politics skews round the presentation of the facts to the general public, it distorts the flow of finance no less: Net TV while freefalling in audience ratings still collars an outsize share of the advertising market. We can only speculate and surmise what causes this extraordinary phenomenon. Do we have a high proportion of self-harming businessmen in this country? Poorly informed advertisers? The law of libel prevents further and more plausible speculation.
Journalism is closely related to politics. The limit to the action of politicians is set by their voters. The quality of journalism is determined by what audiences will demand and accept. If politicians are clowns it is because people who should throw them out on their ear return them to parliament every five years. If journalism is not up to scratch, fails to report the news faithfully or does not report at all or not on time, it is because somebody still buys the rag or watches the programme. If your favourite read is dominated by a known character assassin, you are an accomplice. It really is as simple as that. If you want something better you will certainly get it but only if you realise that only you can demand it.
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Could his audience, old hacks and starry eyed aspirants as they may have been, have failed to notice that he is the boss as far as the PN media empire is concerned? They must have found it an inspiring performance. If they managed neither to laugh nor to cry it was because they’d had a stunning lesson in the measurement of the distance between rhetoric and reality.
