His hands ain't dirty!

I couldn't believe my eyes when I read a very small item in last Tuesday's The Malta Independent. So much so, that I read it again. The MLP had objected to a headline in Sunday's PBS television news bulletin that said: "The MLP leader washed his hands of the resignation of the National Statistics director-general".

The MLP apparently found this headline objectionable because it "was attributed to Alfred Sant" and did not make sense when compared with the contents of the relative news item which was a report of Dr Sant's speech delivered in Vittoriosa last Sunday.

The facetiousness of this protest takes the cake. What did Dr Sant actually say? According to last Monday's The Malta Independent, he "denied that a campaign was carried out against the person (the NSO director-general), whom Dr Sant affirmed to never mentioning personally. Dr Sant claimed the MLP has only asked for an explanation to the revised statistics. One of the strangest things in this controversy is the resignation of the former director even though the MLP had never asked for it, said Dr Sant."

Just in case I got it wrong I checked the report of the same speech in last Tuesday's The Times: "The Labour Party had never called for the resignation of National Statistics Office director-general Gordon Cordina, an unapologetic Alfred Sant said. Speaking during a political activity in Vittoriosa on Sunday, Dr Sant said he was unimpressed with the PN's 'strange' and 'stupid' campaign in protest at Dr Cordina's resignation."

I have no doubt that these reports are correct. In fact they tally exactly with what Dr Sant was reported to have said in last Monday's l-Orizzont! Were his comments more than just a cynical ploy to distance himself and the official Labour Party from the Labour opinion writers who not only mentioned Dr Cordina by name but also attacked him in the most vicious way? Whatever Leo Brincat, Joe Sammut, Luciano Busuttil and Lino Cassar and a host of other Labour commentators - including the editorialist of l-Orizzont - wrote about Dr Cordina was discarded in one fell swoop. Just follow the leader and not the pack of wolves that is at his beck and call!

Yet, how can the MLP media executive explain how and why the PBS journalist who reported that Dr Sant had 'washed his hands' of the Cordina resignation could have been wrong? Why does the MLP expect that PBS should be constrained to report only what Dr Sant says verbatim?

To make a not so perfect analogy, if a public figure declares that he only wears red ties while sporting a blue tie would it not be the journalist's duty to report what he said together with the circumstances in which the comments were made? Should any journalist be obliged to report solely what the person in question says without reporting also the obvious implication of his words? So where is the blunder made by the PBS journalist who described Dr Sant's declarations as washing his hands of the Cordina resignation when, in actual fact, that was exactly what these declarations amounted to?

The corollary of this absurd protest is even more absurd. When the MLP deny that Dr Sant washed his hands of the Cordina resignation, the implication is that his hands are dirty with the mess from which Dr Cordina felt he had to distance himself! Which is the exact opposite of the message Dr Sant tried to convey last Sunday.

You see, his hands ain't dirty, even though he did not wash them! But perhaps, the MLP only wanted to deny that Dr Sant had actually made an explicit declaration saying that he was washing his hands of the resignation... and not that he did not do exactly that!

In this case, apparently the MLP not only want to have the cake and eat it but they want to have the cake, eat it, regurgitate it and eat it again!

What lies behind this MLP stand in reaction to what was a truthful and fair journalistic report? I think that any level headed person cannot but construe that the headline was 'spot on' as an interpretation of what Dr Sant had said. Leaving aside any comparisons with the way the MLP media distort whatever is said by Government spokesmen or by anyone who is being targeted by them, I can only conclude that the strategy leading to this protest is ominous.

It all boils down to the obsession that the media are to be controlled - the same obsession that led to Brian Hansford opting out of the election for the MLP executive so as to be free to tell the truth in his television programme on Smash TV!

Controlling the media is tantamount to thought control. Those who are too young to remember how public broadcasting was taken completely over by the MLP in the Seventies and Eighties might think that I am somewhat exaggerating. In those years the Labour government unashamedly abused of public broadcasting by constraining it to transmit exclusively the message it wanted to push down everybody's throat. It is the same mentality that now wants to condition public broadcasting so as to ensure that in reporting the MLP, PBS sends only the message that the MLP wants to send and in the manner it solely chooses.

No journalist worth his salt should be prepared to accept this bullying. Here in Malta we have two journalists' associations. Neither of them bothered to react to this obscene Labour 'protest'. They are happy to pontificate about the tiffs between the small fry whenever they officially receive a complaint but do not dare defend journalistic professionalism when it is attacked in the most blatant way by the MLP. Certainly, there is another case of 'washing of hands' here!

And what are PBS and the Broadcasting Authority going to make of this protest? Anything other than sending the MLP to blazes on this one will be a disservice to democracy and to Maltese journalism at large.

micfal@maltanet.net