It has never ceased to surprise me that so many Maltese politicians have at some point been journalists. From Joseph Muscat to David Casa, David Agius to Joe Mifsud, they’ve all done their little sojourn on the airwaves.
At first glance the reason looks obvious. Journalists, especially of the radio and television media, tend to become household names. The temptation to convert that capital into ballot papers is too much for most and they end up courting voters ever after.
That’s the abridged version. Things are, in fact, rather more complicated, for it is not just politics that leads our journalists astray. Some go on to become lawyers or to work in marketing or some other field.
Many go for the mixed solution of journalism as a side interest. There’s no shortage of distractions from professionalism.
My impression is that journalists in Malta come and go like ships in the night. Most tend to be young and inexperienced, with obviously very little background. Stalwarts of the business like, say, Reno Bugeja, are thin on the ground – and even they can hardly be said to have the punching power and institutional gravitas of a Jeremy Paxman or a Richard Dimbleby. The fact that a programme like Dissett should hang in the balance says it all really.
This seems to contradict what I said earlier about household names, but I don’t think it necessarily does. Muscat and Agius were indeed ‘big names’ in their time, but not really as journalists in the proper sense of the word. Rather, party loyalists saw them as the quintessential Labourite and Nationalist respectively.
Their ‘greatness’ lay in their ability to bash (the Maltese verb is sawwat, literally ‘to whip’) the enemy. They perfected the party rhetoric to a fine art and that’s the best you could expect of them.
The point is that, in spite of the huge proliferation of channels and the growing reams of printed pages, journalism has not (yet?) established itself as a serious career choice. Rather, it’s a fairly lousy stepping-stone job one is likely to drift through en route to other things.
Take Miriam Dalli. I mention her specifically because I consider her one of a handful of fine journalists – eloquent, well prepared, and not given to antics like chasing ministers around with silly and irritating (to viewers) questions. Her programme, TX, is head and shoulders above the rest of One TV’s line-up.
Problem is, she probably won’t be in business for much longer. Dalli is studying law. Never mind her excellent track record and the respect she enjoys across the board, her ambition is to leave it all behind for the excitement and originality of traipsing between City Gate and Caffe Cordina, toga draped ‘carelessly’ over her arms.
Hardly surprising, for life is particularly pointless for party hacks. They are condemned to commute between two deep-frozen poles.
When they interview politicians in their party they are reduced to prompters, asking questions like ‘How do you plan to continue your excellent work?’, ‘What do you make of the opposition’s nastiness?’, ‘Would you share with us the secret of your great success?’, and such. Kim Jong Il would feel very much at home.
When playing away, on the other hand, they are seen as an enemy to be evaded, possibly crushed. I’m not particularly in love with Charlon Gouder but I still think he was treated very unfairly indeed by the Prime Minister at the last Independence Day ‘interview’.
He was repeatedly mocked and yelled at, and at one point even challenged to take his ‘accusations’ of corruption to a police station. On that occasion the Prime Minister seemed to mistake Gouder for someone fair and chubby.
A sad predicament to bounce back and forth between being a prompter and a sort of second-rate enemy. Either way, politicians have party hacks very much by the short and curlies, making it very hard for them to be taken seriously as journalists. No wonder Dalli has legal aspirations.
The specifics are not incidental. In fact, they’re a second reason why the life of a Maltese journalist tends to be so nasty, brutish, and short. I don’t think I will surprise many by saying it has to do with a comatose conservatism.
It’s quite a few years now since our University was transformed from a boring technical college to a fairly exciting and promiscuous place where one is spoilt for choice between hundreds of course offerings. We now produce (‘churn out’, as the green-eyed doomsayers put it) thousands of graduates a year in fields as diverse as theatre and Chinese studies.
And yet, many of our qualified adventurers find themselves staring at a brick wall of conservatism which continues to privilege the ‘traditional’ occupations – usually those that go with a Dott title. The Maltese verb ‘laħaq’ (‘to achieve’) is still the prerogative of a handful of career progressions.
Rather like Berlusconi, who preaches that it is better to be dysfunctionally straight than functionally gay, we seem to believe that it is better to be an average lawyer than a top journalist.
The direct corollaries of this conservatism are relatively low salaries and prestige for people who work in fields other than the anointed Dott ones. I don’t have the exact figures but I’m pretty sure journalists, our case in point, are generally underpaid, undervalued, and overworked. Never mind how good their language skills are or how keen an eye they have for a story.
The communications courses at University haven’t made much of a difference in this respect. So much so that not many graduates in communications go on to long-term careers in journalism. Most end up working in marketing or advertising, or reinvent themselves entirely.
I don’t blame them, not when the prospects range from impotent party hack to underpaid toiler adrift in a touch-and-go sea of amateurism.
mafalzon@hotmail.com