By the time you read this, Ryanair should have delivered me safely back to our shores, from whence I hope to have hopped off again to Gozo to have a spot of r’n’r after a pretty hectic week’s break.
I mean, what with trying to cram the whole Edinburgh Fringe into three days (I exaggerate a tad) and ’Er Indoors’ obsession with getting to walk up hills (talk about unnatural practices) it’s been pretty exhausting.
While we were away, the thug Muammar Gaddafi’s beginning of the end, hopefully by now the ended end, came down, which we were able to follow online through Twitter and other internet news sources, the hotel where we were having Wi-Fi but no mobile signal or rolling news networks. I’ve blogged about a few aspects of the Libya situation and since I’m way behind the curve, I’ll refer any interested reader that-a-way, where you can also read some of the comments, which go really quite a distance to prove a thesis I floated in an earlier blog.
Something else which happened, and which I really, really loved, was the complete and utter creaming that Julia Farrugia and her so-called newspaper got at the hands of the Press Ethics Commission. Now, for various reasons, I’ve never been much of a fan of the august bodies behind this commission, for all that the commission itself in its latter-day manifestations is made up of good men and true.
One of the main reasons why I’ve not been much enamoured of the said institutions is, paradoxically, people whose loyalties to journalism appear to have been long ago eclipsed by a loyalty to other causes. Unlike Groucho Marx, it’s not to a club that would have me as a member that I wouldn’t apply, it’s to one that has these people in it.
Before the usual suspects start berating me for not applying the same standards to myself that the commission expected of (and did not find in) Ms Farrugia, let me point out that this is only an opinion column, mine and mine alone. I do not classify myself as a journalist, though there are some definitions of the word that include writers such as me, because by so doing I would dilute the standards – high as they are – that proper journalists (and Ms Farrugia and her ilk are now excluded from this definition) should set themselves.
For the record, the Press Ethics Commission found Ms Farrugia, and consequently her newspaper and publishing house, guilty of unethical behaviour when she wrote, and they published, a story that was manifestly unfair on, and to all material extents untrue about, the then-chairman of PBS. Ms Farrugia failed to check her facts and, according to the commission, she proceeded from the premise that the story was true and worked back from there instead of doing what any half-decent journalist would do and verifying, once if not twice.
But for certain types of people, the story is a means to an end and if the end means making a thoroughly decent man suffer, then so be it, he will have to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency. Like a true gentleman, Joe Mizzi resigned as soon as the story broke, while protesting his innocence.
He has now been found blameless and reinstated, quite properly (though, of course, the usual Lil’Elves found something wrong with this too; the way these people fight rearguard actions would be touching if it weren’t so cynical) and the only people who have come out of this smelling bad, really, really bad are Ms Farrugia and her bosses, whose agenda, to say nothing of their fingers in the whole sorry pie, should really be examined very closely.
The Farrugia affair demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the media operators on the Labour side of the fence (and please don’t anyone tell me that Ms Farrugia’s heart doesn’t beat on that side of the fence) are more than a few print runs short of a scoop, both in the matter of being competent to do their job and in the matter of having the grasp needed of the ethical and moral strictures that should form the framework within which they work.
It is now, at least while I write this in the Scottish Highlands on Tuesday evening, a matter of conjecture as to whether Ms Farrugia or the rest of her sorry ilk will even consider resigning. However, I doubt that Ms Farrugia will feel that she should do this little thing.
In fact, just before the commission concluded its work, she had already started laying the groundwork to start calling this a frame-up and political discrimination and every other epithet under the sun, so don’t hold your breath waiting for her to do the decent thing.
Just consider her a shining example of her side of the political spectrum.
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