Is it true that the Court found Jason Azzopardi not guilty of criminal libel as accused by the police on the advice of the Attorney General? The answer is: not true. I don’t blame you if this surprises you. If you follow the media, you would have been led to believe that Azzopardi faced such an accusation. Editors, senior journalists and respected commentators repeated this ad nauseam. A small group of Labour supporters in front of the court accused Simon Busuttil of hypocrisy as he himself had taken, they said, similar measures.
But when the court convened, the presiding Magistrate Joe Mifsud clearly said that the court was considering a case of defamation, not criminal libel: two different kettle of fish.
Instead of explaining the difference, sections of the media just kept on repeating the criminal libel mantra. Interested politicians uncontrollably spun this tale, feasting, as they are wont to do, on people’s ignorance.
In its well-researched and important sentence the court emphasised that this was not a case of criminal libel but of defamation: an accusation that Azzopardi was freed from.
Does it make a difference? The truth always does.
For Azzopardi, the difference could have been a prison sentence. He should know now that he should quote original sources instead of newspaper reports.
But there is a more important difference for society at large. A democratic society cannot function as a normal democratic society if people are not served with factually correct news reports. There are many cases, particularly in the reportage of political news, where this is systematically disregarded. Last Sunday I referred to the institutionalisation of spin as this government is spending more money on propaganda than ever before.
The maxim that in war the first casualty is truth has been frequently repeated since Aeschylus said it five centuries before Christ. The same maxim is unfortunately true of any period of intense polarisation, political polarisation included. Alas, such are the times.
More worrying still is the maxim corollary: a close second victim is the desire to know the truth. During such times, people prefer to listen only to their side to avoid troubling dissonant news but risking being misinformed or, at best, very selectively informed.
How are the political media faring in this situation?
According to surveys of the Broadcasting Authority, One TV reached an audience of 73,000 during the 2013 electoral campaign. Every survey since then demonstrates that it is losing its audience. It now has an audience of 47,000. One Radio dipped its audience from 31,600 to 25,000.
The scenario is a bit more complex for the PN media. Radio 101’s audience increased from 8,600 in 2013 to 15,700 this year. Net TV’s audience had dipped from 38,500 during the electoral campaign to just 27,000 in 2015 but it increased it to 35,800 this year.
When one considers that the Labour Party polled 167,000 to the 132,000 polled by the Nationalist Party it is clear that these media are preaching mainly, if not solely, to party diehards.
It is impossible to keep up with the outrageous list of scandals plaguing this government, not that it seems to care
This, in my opinion, is a lost opportunity.
TVM, on the other hand, as always, is the most popular station. It has the largest budgets, thus affording the most popular programmes. But is not the increase in the number of drama programmes and the relegation of most ‘independent’ discussion programmes to a time that is unpopular with audiences a clear sign that the powers-that-be do not want TVM to be as strong on informative discussion programmes as it is on entertainment which alienates?
This option serves government but not the public, a clear abdication of its responsibility to serve us, the public.
In view of this dereliction of duty, the onus of responsibility naturally falls on the print and web media in English. Were it not for these, we would not have known of the oil procurement scandal before the elections and the deluge of scandals regularly being exposed after the election. It is impossible to keep up with the outrageous list of scandals plaguing this government, not that it seems to care.
The Café Premier and Gaffarena scandals were exposed by these media and then condemned in reports published by the Auditor General. The Panamagate scandal was ferreted out by journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, while other media followed by digging up new unsavoury aspects. Then it exploded on the international stage as Panama Papers after 11.5 million e-mails were revealed by an international consortium of journalists.
The government is hoping that the storm will blow over. Fresh revelations have kept it alive. But most of all it has been kept alive because this is a story originated by the media and sustained by the media.
The media does care about its own creations and keeps on nourishing them. Even if its news cycle will eventually abate, replaced as it could very well be by another scandal, it will remain as one of the worst blemishes of the present administration. No spin cycle is powerful enough to launder the string of illegalities, unethical behaviour, lies and improper behaviour.
The Scottish campaigner Jimmy Reid used to say that “the task of the media in a democracy is not to ease the path of those who govern, but to make life difficult for them by constant vigilance as to how they exercise the power they only hold in trust from the people”.
This should also be the task of many other national institutions that are behaving like the three proverbial monkeys. In the Azzopardi case, for example, the police did not believe there was a case but proceeded just the same because the Attorney General told them to. This passing on of the buck was lambasted by the court.
We expect, as of right, that national institutions stop passing on the buck or feign ignorance but do their duty also in the Panama Papers scandal as their first duty is to us citizens, not to government.
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt