I have a friend whose job involves writing puff pieces for catering establishments and hotels. This involves weekly freebies, meals and overnight stays in establishments all over the island.

People imagine it’s a dream job – wining and dining practically for free. But my friend says there are downsides to it – namely having to be relentlessly positive about crappy meals and pretentious places offering bog-standard accommodation and tired amenities.

He says that the only way to get through another tired cream of tomato soup dinner and bland peach bedroom is to try and blank them out and concentrate on the positive aspects.

So if a hotel serves slimy sandwich ham wrapped round weeping melon slices in a very rough approximation of Parma ham with melon, my friend’s write-up will only mention the stunning view. And if the hotel sports threadbare carpets in that ubiquitous mustard shade, the promo hypes up the cleanliness of the loos.

I imagine it’s a lot like being a journalist or a reporter for the Labour Party-owned media at the moment. Every initiative of the Labour government is described in glowing terms in breathless tones. The news which does not shed a positive light on Labour (such as the Armier scandal) is ignored or glossed over.

On the other end of the spectrum, we find the Nationalist media which has discovered we are going to hell in a handcart. Whereas before March 2013 the economy was booming, public corporations were captained by deserving people who were appointed solely on merit and who were immune to bribery and corruption, now we scrabble for survival while the ruling elite stamp on us with their jackboots.

I understand that writing for party media necessarily involves some extent of rallying the troops and pointing out that ‘we are better than them’ and therefore some poetic licence with the truth.

At times – however – this veers into the ridiculous. An example of this absurd reporting appeared in the Nationalist paper In-Nazzjon, which described the latest act of deceit, treachery and callousness of the Labour government.

This consisted of raising the minimum rent for social housing from €24 every three months to €50 for the same period of time. Now I know that there are people who live on the breadline, but I also know that not all the people who occupy social housing live in abject poverty.

Moreover, those tenants who qualify for housing usually qualify for other rebates and benefits. In any case, wasn’t the previous rate of €0.26 a day an unrealistically low rent to pay? You know where this kind of reporting gets us? To a state where we foster exceedingly high expectations in the electorate, which are unsustainable.

It’s like being a journalist for the Labour media. Every initiative of the Labour government is described in glowing terms

I wonder how the party media will cope when the PN eventually makes it back to government and has to cope with people demanding housing for €0.26 a day.

• Several years ago when I had just started writing a newspaper column, I had commented on a number of cases of people charged with committing sexual offences. The nature of the charges was broadly the same – all were accused of having committed crimes of a sexual nature. None was related to the victim and it was unlikely that the publication of the name of the accused would lead to the identification of the victim. So far, so similar.

What really stood out, however, was the disparity in the court decisions regarding the publication of the names of the accused. In three out of four cases, there was no prohibition on the publication of the name, whereas in the remaining cases this was not allowed. This last offender had pleaded guilty to possessing reams of pornographic film and photographs featuring very young children.

Although the presiding magistrate described his actions as being “very repulsive” (some of the children shown in his cache of porn material were not even nine years old), he walked out of court a mere Lm100 poorer and with the predictable suspended sentence but with his anonymity preserved. The court ordered that his name not be published.

I remember asking why this should be so? All other things being equal, why should certain people accused of a crime have their good name smirched, whereas others continued to benefit from anonymity? If everybody charged with an offence is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty, then it should follow that that presumption of innocence should be extended to his status.

If we’re not going with that, on the grounds that certain types of offenders – such as sexual predators or fraudsters – are likely to strike again, then we should decide that the names of all those accused of committing a crime should be published.

We can’t go on like this, with some people having to survive going through the harrowing judicial process with the added stress of being branded a sex fiend, whereas others facing similar charges get by with furtive little outings to court and no publicity. It’s got to be an ‘all or nothing’ approach.

Uniformity is needed not only for the individuals involved but also to stop people coming to the conclusion that some of those accused enjoy preferential status because of their social, political or financial connections. The need for guidelines is imperative, otherwise we can’t blame people for resorting to the web to try and even out the playing field.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt