Lilli Gruber can have my vote anytime

THE SUNDAY TIMES readers should have found Lilli Gruber's carpeting of Malta for not having a completely free Press uplifting. If she ever runs for politics here, Lilli Gruber has my vote.

Lilli Gruber, herself once a daring foreign correspondent for RAI TV and now a Member of the European Parliament, is an erstwhile exponent of deceit who takes a brave axe to deficit journalistic practices. It was a question of time before Maltese political parties came into her sights for the stranglehold they maintain on the media in Malta. Her recent no-holds-barred swipe in the European Parliament is unlikely to be her last.

It is amazing how Maltese politicians continue to unashamedly deny people the right to the free flow of objective information. Try and convince them it is the impact the country's institutions have on our daily lives - together, of course, with what the government and the Opposition parties bring to the table - that makes us cast our vote one way or the other, and they will mark you down as a basket case.

Brussels should waste no time ordering both the Labour Party and the ruling Nationalists to dismantle their disproportionately-sized media outfits - and to stop manipulating information on state TV.

This country lives myths few countries find affordable these days.

One bizarre piece of fiction firmly embedded in the minds of those running the Labour and the Nationalist parties centre round the ersatz power of the Press. Politicians assume it is the media that actually inspire and formulate public opinion, more so when it comes to whom we should vote into power.

As a result, they have, over the years, ring-fenced the flow of information with party-owned news outfits that provide tailor-made versions of the truth. Needless to say, this has netted no one much benefit. The only discernible result was the rapid dumbing down of newspaper, radio and TV journalism.

This is, of course, irreducibly wrong, because somewhere along the line we are being made to accept that democracy is possible without a free Press. We are being asked to believe that newspapers, radio and TV stations run from party headquarters (outfits that variously act as beauticians and demonic lighting conductors) and can suitably replace the distribution of accurate information delivered to us without fear or favour.

Democracy only functions when the information one needs to make the right choices for himself is objective and untainted by political or personal interests. That calibre of information in Malta is as rare as chicken's teeth. As a result, we have been chipping away at chunks of our national identity. This may be worth discussing a tad further.

Over the years, the use political parties have made of the media has turned them into past masters of moral equivalence, a radical Jewish belief that runs fundamentally counter to Christian mores and in turn to a major aspect of Malta's national identity. You can't call yourself Catholic and act Jewish.

Moral equivalence gives one the right to do whatever one thinks is right without the need for a fulsome free debate. It's an argument Israel uses incessantly, these days in its fight with the Palestinians.

When the Nationalist government, despite its many attributes in other fields, allowed political parties to set up their own radio and TV stations in addition to their print media "in the national interest", it was indulging in moral equivalence. The country's best interests lie, clearly, in promoting a well-informed society - not in creating media that fight the corner of political parties.

In allowing PBS to screen, each day of the week, unthinkably low-standard locally-produced programmes on the grounds that these send ratings shooting skyward, the government is indulging in best practice moral equivalence. PBS should be providing us with quality programmes and, in the case of news, with the whole truth, warts and all.

In shelling out taxpayers' money to companies that act as the government's make-up artist on TV while producing morally objectionable programmes, PBS is, week after week, upholding the principle of moral equivalence. You can't do that and call yourself a Catholic country and, if you do, you are trying to become something you are not. That's how you get to lose your national identity.

Dom Mintoff may have foolishly tried to use public broadcasting to raise a generation of Socialists but then he did not call himself a Christian Democrat. He was a maverick.

Worse still, we may have unconsciously slipped into adopting as our mainstream culture the distasteful sub-culture he abortively tried to foist on us all those years ago. Watch PBS on Wednesday and Thursday night and you'll see TV chat hosts guiding people discuss some very serious values this country lives by on the basis of unthinkably shallow notions.

Watch PBS on Sunday night, watch Net TV and there, you'll see reconstituted, morally suspect and talent-less relics from those faraway days of Dom Mintoff. They are brought there because politicians think they are capable of pulling in the gullible crowds into the fold. Nothing damages better a whole nation's future values than this wanton embrace of relativism.

I was stunned over Christmas to hear a member of the PBS editorial board claim there was nothing ethically or morally wrong in turning L-Istrina into a nationwide gambling junket and in using shots of seriously ill people to spur sentiment as long as all this helps to raise charity cash.

This, madam, is pure Talmudic, as far removed from Christian thinking as you can go. All of this is making people suspect the government may not be sailing by its own moral compass of Christian values, probably to retain popular support.

As Malta continues to change, the need for unbiased, objective media that help us inform ourselves properly of what is taking place, and why, has to become more pressing. Both political parties can do no worse than begin to deliver us from this almighty mess without having to be ordered to by Brussels.

One question taxing Lilli Gruber's mind must be this: which part of the equation "No-Free-Press-Equals-No-Democracy-Equals-No-Economic-Growth" do Maltese politicians find so difficult to understand?