Simon Busuttil is right to do away with those hopelessly outdated and utterly useless Sunday sermons that the Nationalist and Labour Party leaders give every weekend. Since the 1980s, the drill has always been the same – the party leader, party big shots, candidates and assorted minions descend upon a każin (club) to be met by the party councillors of that locality.
There they spill out the anti-government or anti-Opposition spiel of the week. The audience is made up entirely of the speakers and their relatives.
You can bet your last euro cent that the One TV cameras will zoom in on the one man who is snoozing off at the back of the club while Busuttil urges PN members to be vigilant at all times. In the same vein Net TV cameras will invariably pan in on the middle-aged women wearing the pre-Joseph ‘torċa’ T-shirts and texting furiously while the Prime Minister thunders on about increasing productivity.
Later on, the speech will be broadcast by the party media, there will be a spat of the denials and counter-accusations between the government and the Opposition which are sometimes carried by the morning papers. But things stop there.
Those Sunday sermons sink like a stone without causing any effect on the wider audience of people who wouldn’t dream of lugging themselves down to a każin on a Sunday morning. So it’s a very unproductive exercise on all counts.
The main drawback of these sorts of events is that they consist of preaching to the converted. I don’t imagine there has been even one case of a person changing his political views after hearing these speeches at a political party club. Chances are that no one who needed to be persuaded would be in a każin anyway. The mistake that the larger parties have been making in sticking to the Sunday sermon format is that of not defining their audience and tailoring their message to particular audiences.
The get-togethers of the party faithful are necessary to shore up morale among party loyalists and should not be nixed completely. However, they can’t replace other forms of communication with the electorate. I can see that it’s an uphill battle trying to find a media strategy that works in a wider context with voters who are suffering from election fatigue and who are far more taken up with exam revision, the first swims of summer and the World Cup. But admitting that change is needed is a start.
• I was having lunch with some friends who work in the media the other day. At one point some of them commented on how strange it was to see that although Joseph Muscat’s honeymoon period should be over by now and he’s slipped up in a big way on his meritocracy pledge, the media isn’t gunning for him. It’s as if his biggest boobs slip under the radar while every step wrong that the Nationalist Party makes is placed under a microscope.
It’s not that Muscat isn’t at the receiving end of any criticism – it’s that it seems to have no effect on him
I’m not sure I agree with this assessment. The fact that there were some of the appointments of consultants, garage-seekers and whatnots make a mockery of the term ‘meritocracy’ has not escaped notice or comment. Neither has Labour’s laissez-faire approach to anything remotely approaching the protection of the environment.
And Muscat’s new description of what makes a ‘suldat tal-azzar’ (‘soldier of steel’) has definitely not gone down well with the real ‘soldiers of steel’ who stood up for the Labour Party when it was most difficult to do so. Again, this has not passed unnoticed by the mainstream media or the social media and Muscat has received a fair share of flak for it.
So ultimately, it’s not that Muscat isn’t at the receiving end of any criticism – it’s that it seems to have no effect on him or his popularity ratings. He’s the Teflon Prime Minister – nothing sticks to him. I attribute this to two main reasons.
First, there’s the legitimising power of that massive majority that Labour has gained in the last two outings to the polling booth. People assume that a Prime Minister who has achieved that kind of feat must be doing well overall. Plus there’s a bit of the crowd mentality effect – people figure that the hundreds of thousands of people who voted for Labour can’t all be wrong.
Apart from this, there are some sections of the media that have gone completely quiet about Labour. Take Lou Bondi, for example. Up to a couple of days before the last election he was harrying away at everything Labour, his blog a constant stream of sarcasm about the idiocy, vulgarity and utter hopelessness that was Labour. Then the man whose programme carried the ‘Ġurnalismu Fuq Kollox’ tagline was given €54,000 a year for a work-from-home job for a newly-created post organising national celebrations or similar.
(To put you in the picture – doctors and people who work with the civil service have to jump through an amazing amount of bureaucratic hoops and hurdles to be authorised to work on reduced hours to spend family time with their children. It seems Bondi didn’t find it so difficult to land family-friendly time at the expense of the taxpayer).
And all of a sudden, Bondi goes silent on all things government-related. His investigative talents are mothballed and we get his boring Beatles tribute thing going on all the time. Ironically enough he had written a blog post about PN defectors back in 2011 chastising Marisa Micallef (once a huge PN fan and Gonzi-appointed Housing Authority chairman, then embraced Labour, got a great job with Labour and is now Ambassador to US) for “defecting from money to money” and becoming as “elusive as Big Foot” on her defection.
Now that the same thing has happened to him (journalistically-speaking), we can see why some sectors of the media are so noticeably silent. As Neil Diamond sang, “Money talks”. It does. I’m not sure it can buy credibility though.
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt