OF GEESE AND OTHER BEASTS

The Fourth Estate, being a pompous way of saying "the media", has a significant role in a democracy, as one of the ways the citizenry can keep tabs on the other three pillars. For those of you who suffer from a democratic deficit, these are the Judiciary, Parliament and the Executive.

Each of the other three also plays its part in checking and balancing the others, hence the description of democracy as being a system of, duh, checks and balances. There's also the balance that has to be struck between individual rights and freedoms and the needs of society as a whole, a phenomenon that was debated within the divorce debate.

The problem with the media in a jurisdiction the size of ours is that since everyone knows everyone else, the "without fear or favour" inspiration that should underpin all its activities (as it should the other three, for that matter) tends to be diluted and when you then add into the mix the fact that many elements of the media are owned (directly or indirectly) by a political party, the equation becomes even more complex.

One of the ways media that bows and scrapes could save itself some, though not all, of its blushes, is to at least try to be even-handed, or at least truthful, in its treatment of stories.

Not much of a hope in hell of that happening, though, so we the people have to try to find our own balance, which is not always that easy, to put it mildly.

For instance, why did no element of the media that I noticed pick up the story that Super One had lied about a passage of friction its rude mechanicals had had with Mrs Daphne Caruana Galizia? The Court stung the former a few euros for libeling the latter by, not to put too fine a point on it, lying about her. This was not a comment that went too far, it was a simple, bare-faced, lie about facts, which the prim and proper always tell us are sacred.

If they lie about something like this, what else are they lying about?

Equally, Labour's media make fine songs and dances about the association of PN figures with denizens of the business world, but when their own do the same, it's as if nothing happened. If a PN Mayor uses a Council laptop at home, snide remarks are made all over the place, but when an official car (one that straddles two of the pillars of our democracy, to boot) is used for toy deliveries, then the story never sees the light of day.

Likewise when shady characters are involved, if they're seen with PN people, shock horror erupts, if they're with Labour guys, such as Joseph Muscat's pretty picture with a certain Zubina, about whom much fuss had been made just in September, then it's alright, nothing to worry about.