Though it was months after the fighting had stopped, the Falklands Campaign was still a hot issue and flying the British Prime Minister there was considered a highly dangerous feat. So when a journalist asked Margaret Thatcher’s chief press secretary, Bernard Ingham, whether such a trip was on the cards, the civil servant found himself in a spot.
He knew it would happen but could not say so. So he opened the official diary and asked the journalist to check for himself whether any such trip was diarised. Of course, top secret missions are not usually put down in writing on an official diary.
He opted to do it in an intelligent manner rather by resorting to silly antics or expecting the press to do the government’s bidding. That is what the Parliamentary Secretary for Animal Rights, Roderick Galdes, expected Times of Malta to do when he urged this organisation to write positive stories while probing the number of illegal livestock farms.
We had been asking what proportion of livestock farms are not yet compliant with EU laws and why they have not yet been shut down. Yet, the best the secretariat could do was to say: “Mr Galdes said that it seems that you had agreed to limit such stories and focus on the positive side of the sector.” It even suggested the name of a person who can “guide” us.
Times of Malta, of course, made no such agreement. Evidently, it was wishful thinking by the secretariat.
Mr Galdes already let animals and animal lovers down when, by omission or commission, he allowed his government to appease hunters. Now, he appears to be not too concerned with the danger that the dumping of slurry (liquid manure from livestock farms) on agricultural fields could have on people’s health.
Mr Galdes is not the only government politician seeking to manipulate the press. And, yes, all governments the world over do it but that does not mean that society and the press should take it lying down.
The press, the Fourth Estate, has a primary role to play in a law-abiding, thriving democracy and any attempt to stifle it or make its life more difficult is a grave indictment on those who do so.
The Press Act demands that the government should have in place “procedures to give representatives of the press the information which helps them fulfil their public tasks”.
Yet it has become a practice for ministries and government entities to take an eternity to respond to journalists’ questions, hoping against hope they will give up.
Sometimes they do not reply at all and, on other occasions, they devise methods to avoid exposing ministers/parliamentary secretaries to direct questioning by journalists. On one recent occasion, the Prime Minister chose to leave the building through a side door as the press waited outside near the front door to speak to him.
As the former British Chief Justice, Lord Judge – himself of Maltese descent – once said: “Ideas and information may be imparted without interference by public authority, unless limitations are imposed for identified specific policy reasons. None of those reasons for limiting the imparting of information ever extends to information with which the government or authorities of the day, or indeed a large body of citizens, may disagree or view with distaste.”
Some people would do well not only to read those words, but to digest and understand them.