Consider, if you will, the three stories that have taken up our attention over the past couple of months or so. Forget about minor issues, such as the relative safety of our shores in the middle of a financial cataclysm or the contrast of our public order standards with Britain just at the moment; concentrate your minds on the real stuff.
They are the passing of the divorce law, the introduction of a completely new public transport system and the trials and tribulations of two members of the Engerer family, which came about around the time when the lesser of the two decided to forswear his previous declared fealty to the Nationalist Party and become a pin-up boy for Labour’s Movement for Progressive Moderates.
I am as guilty as the next columnist of the charge of writing about these astoundingly vital topics to the point of being boring, though, in my own defence, I was among the first campaigning to get divorce introduced, as a means of weakening the grip of the reactionary forces of piety on our secular state.
On the other topics, and on the latter-day aspects of the divorce debate, I was trying, at risk of being called a running-dog lackey of the ruling class, to propose different ways of looking at the subjects.
An astute reader will have noticed long ago that, in the vast majority of scribbles about divorce, the buses and young Cyrus, Joseph Muscat’s newest Best Best Friend (or is he?), there is a common strand. This common strand was and remains the way in which each of the topics became one within which the Nationalist government, and Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi particularly, was portrayed in a bad light.
When we were regaled with the deep thoughts of most people about divorce, after the referendum had passed and the Prime Minister had declared that the will of the majority would be given effect, we heard not about the positive phenomenon of “we the people” finally telling the fundamentalists where to get off but about the Prime Minister’s perfectly legal, if slightly jarring, vote against, for all the world as if it made a difference.
And when the old public transport system was dismantled and replaced wholesale and overnight, the word put out by the massed ranks of opinion-formers was that GonziPN was personally responsible for the death of a system that no one could stand, before it became a paragon of all virtues, just because the new system had teething troubles.
True, the teething troubles went on more than was acceptable and the operators should be castigated severely, even if they were scuppered by people not turning up for work, but, seriously, was the non-arrival of Omnibuscular Valhalla overnight really and truly deserving of such a deluge of whining and whinging?
Moving on down the list of amusements for the masses, we had the spectacle of someone who had heretofore seemed pretty normal managing to contradict himself spectacularly in the space of a few days and then dropping his new BBF into such a load of mire that it would have needed an excavator to get him out, in a normal media environment.
The thing is, Dr Muscat’s open-armed welcome to someone who has now shown himself up to be a couple of snaps short of an album when it comes to political nous failed to make the news because the media became flooded with spurious stories about phone calls to coppers and the influence thereof, for all the world as if no one knows that the Commissioner of Police is not about to bow to anyone’s pressure, even if, for the sake of argument, any sort of pressure was being exerted, which it quite clearly was not. It would be an interesting thesis to write, analysing the behaviour of elements of the mainstream media when confronted with news.
Let’s define our terms: news is not reported by taking a press handout and rewriting it. News is not reported, either, by referring to your personal agenda and tailoring the report to fit. And news is not reported by applying a tape measure to the number of column inches you write and trying to allocate the same number of column inches to the opposing view,.
News, for instance, is reporting on the social relationships of those who would seek to govern us in the not-so-distant future when these relationships demonstrate a grasp of propriety that is distinguished by its utter absence. You can’t really blame Dr Muscat, he thinks that Cyrus Engerer’s alleged crimes are his personal affair and they don’t have an impact on his suitability to be a new-found hero for Labour but you can blame the media for not sniffing around a bit.
News, again taking a random example, is the way Dr Muscat undermines respect for the justice system by commenting in a singularly uninformed manner on sentencing and the serving of prison terms. For Joe Public to shoot his mouth off is all very well and good but for the Leader of the Opposition to do that little thing is not quite right.
Still, considering that it seems to have left him unmoved that one of his spokesmen on justice, a practising lawyer, thinks nothing of telling the world that members of the judiciary fawn on him for a pay-rise, I suppose one shouldn’t be too surprised.
But I forget, for much of the mainstream media, it’s only news if it’s bad for the PN, if it’s positive for them, it’s propaganda. And I know I’m repeating a point I made in my blog (and that others have made too) but sometimes you have to ventilate the room before the poison gas takes hold completely and blots out life.
imbocca@gmail.com
www.timesofmalta.com/blogs