Incomplete and unbalanced

The Labour media miss no opportunity to put the EU in a bad light, forgetting its leader's protestations that the EU is basically a good thing, but not for Malta.

One piece of news which hit the headlines earlier this month was that cut-price Viagra will be available to EU officials and MEPs under their mutual health insurance scheme. The insurer pays 85 per cent of the cost of up to six of the anti-impotence pills a month. The maltastar.com, Labour's e-paper, ran the item of news as one of its main stories of the day on August 9.

While informing its readers of this great discovery, the "team" reported that all EU institutions employ 45,000 people between them, thus giving the impression that all of these employees either suffer from impotence or make use of Viagra anyway. Their way of putting things succeeded, so much so that emails on the subject to the e-paper display a belief that all EU institutions' employees are being issued with Viagra.

Here's a quote: "Is it not funny that I would have to pay more taxes to sustain officials and employees of all EU institutions with Viagra pills".

On August 10, the British press carried the same story and the Daily Mail, not exactly a europhile paper, mentioned that only "more than 5,000 members of the EU's health insurance will in theory be eligible for the cut-price Viagra".

It also added that "a Brussels spokesman was at pains to point out yesterday that only a handful of officials and MEPs would meet the stringest medical guidelines necessary to receive the drug at a discount".

They can only qualify "on a medical basis, when it is prescribed as a remedy for something that they already suffer from as a result of a disease like diabetes".

The BBC too ran the story but its Europe correspondent quoted a commission spokesman that he considered the whole story as pathetic, adding that no more than 10 people are claiming Viagra out of 85,000 who work for the commission and parliament, adding that the expense would account for just 0.004 per cent of the EU insurance scheme.

Of course, none of these comments found their way onto maltastar.com. To my mind, this amounted to drip feeding readers with tainted, incomplete and unbalanced information about the EU.

The same type of reporting occurred in relation to the Pope's latest visit to his native Poland. The story run by maltastar.com carried the headline "Pope has not blessed EU enlargement".

It was a report written by Marcin Frydrych of the EU Observer which gloated over the fact that "Pope John Paul II did not refer directly to Polish authorities' efforts to enter the EU, what he had been expected to support." Now the same evening the BBC Europe correspondent in Krakow, Nicholas Walton, reported that in his final address to the Polish people, the Pope "expressed his hope that the country would find its due place in the EU".

Reuters' report in this paper the day after gave a truly balanced account. Everyone knows that Poland is one of the candidate countries waiting for enlargement, so the Papal "hope" is tantamount to favouring enlargement, which in any case on many occasions has been strongly supported by the Holy See and by European Conferences of Bishops. And this is a point of contention with a number of fundamentalist Catholics in Poland who oppose European integration.

Even regular contributors to maltastar.com seem to be adopting the e-paper's penchant for taking its readers and browsers for a ride. Silvan Mifsud, in an article about HSBC in which he repeated what has already been written by a more eminent Mifsud by the name of Alfred, diverted from the subject by referring to his speech at the recent EU Youth Convention in Brussels and the polemic that followed in this paper.

He wrote: "The likes of a certain Salvu Felice Pace and il-Mument criticised me for allegedly dishonouring Malta for downplaying its influential role in the world's history."

He assured his readers in macho style: "I have already answered point by point showing that I did nothing of the sort," conveniently hiding from them the fact that his "point by point" rebuttal published in this paper on July 25 received a factual dressing down once more in this paper on August 2.

I would have thought that in this day and age hiding facts from readers is a very short-term business because sooner or later someone is bound to put the record straight.