Opinion | Sunday, 02 May 2010

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Promoting democracy?

“The most pernicious lie in politics is that the press is a democratising force. Journalists congratulate themselves for promoting democracy even as they seek to shut it down. Witness the frantic campaigns in the Mail, Telegraph, Sun and Express to crush Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. He’s no firebrand, but the rightwing press knows the Lib Dems would introduce proportional representation and a fairer party funding system”. (George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian this week).

Sound familiar? You bet it does. And it’s certainly opportune to take a good, hard look at the way the media operate in our own small corner of the vast land where democracy is said to rule supreme.
Monbiot goes on to explore ways in which new technologies can be harnessed to break what he calls ‘our rotten system’ in which ‘the press (and) party fixers’ wield excessive power. Here’s a rough, bullet-point sketch of where we stand, journalistically, in 2010. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether journalists in this country are promoting, perverting or seeking to shut down democracy.

1) Political party TV and radio stations. If Monbiot thinks that the press and party fixers wield excessive power in Britian, what would he make of a country where roughly half the journalists operate as mouthpieces for the two traditional political parties and frequently use the journalistic route to climb up the political ladder? Several MPs on either side of the House have made use of this route, the stellar metamorphosis of Joseph Muscat from partisan Super One hack to Leader of the Opposition being the most blatant example of the way journalism has been denatured and hijacked in this country.
Journalism as efficient political springboard should be an aberration. In our country it seems to be the accepted norm.

2) Politicians as opinion columnists. A peculiar Maltese phenomenon – which I have not witnessed anywhere else – is the regular presence of what I call politico-journalists in the opinion pages of our more or less independent newspapers. This appears to serve three main functions, the first being to inform readers what a great/hopeless job the government of the day is performing; secondly to keep readers abreast of the work carried out by the politician in question and third to allow up-and-coming politicians to sing the praises of their elders. The overall effect is, inevitably, more political propaganda than journalism proper.

3) Where’s Everybody? The undisputed dominance of this company on the public broadcaster owes a lot to its founders’ ability and continuity but the underlying suspicion of strong bias in favour of the Nationalist Party has been a real problem for a number of years now.
Rather than get caught up in legal argumentation, we should ask ourselves why these perceptions arise. Is it because we’ve lost hope of ever having agenda-free journalism which isn’t fuelled by vested interests? All you have to do to shift perspective is to imagine a long stretch of Labour in government during which the two major discussion programmes aired by the public broadcaster are perceived to be biased towards that party. In particular when the crunch election period approaches. Rewind to Xandir Malta 1986 for the hard-core version and fast-forward to JasonMicallefPlus 2013 for the soft-core one.

4) The Online Bitchfest. Five years after the Maltese blogosphere took off, largely thanks to the efforts of Toni Sant and Jacques Zammit, the situation looks dire. J’accuse’s platform for rational debate – one of the only truly independent spaces available for proper discussion about Maltese politics – is still up and running and there are indications that the political parties are slowly taking note (while several journalists simply give it the cold shoulder).
But two years after Daphne Caruana Galizia warned proponents of the “third way” approach to local politics that they would be considered “hate figures” if Alfred Sant won the 2008 election, that “hatred” has come back to haunt the blogosphere with a vengence.
Unfortunately, when all is said and done, this is where a large chunk of the online political action will take place come election time. Think tanks may be the new ‘healthy’ face of local politics but the real battlefield lies elsewhere… the ‘trash and destroy’ tactics created by zero-sum politics are here to stay. It isn’t at all surprising that some prominent Maltese journalists on either side of our political fence are leading the charge.

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