A passion for the truth

When the Solidarity movement was mobilising the people on the streets of Gdansk and other cities of Poland the whole world waited to see what would happen. Greater anxiety was shown by the powers that were in Eastern Europe. The deputy head of the Hungarian TV news recounted to me the dilemma they were facing in his newsroom. He was speaking to me during one of the sessions of the Salzburg Seminar, Austria, I had attended several years ago.

Should they report these protests or should they ignore them? They decided to report them not out of the passion for the truth that should fill the heart of all journalists but out of a Machiavellian sense of strategy.

“Had we not reported,” the deputy head told me, “the people would have turned to BBC and Voice of America. That would have been worse for the party.”

The Communists did not have the purity of the Evangelical dove but at least they had the craftiness of the snake. Here in Malta is seems that party media neither have one nor the other.

A disappearing act

Take the run-up to the election of the leader of the Labour Party as an example. If one wants to know what is happening then one has to turn to the Nationalist media and to the independent media. Example: The head of the Socialist parliamentary group was in Malta and he addressed a press conference together with Dr Joe Muscat during which he endorsed Muscat. On One TV in the evening we had a report of the press conference, film and all. But Herr Martin Shultz was nowhere to be seen! Incredible but true! The One journalists distanced themselves from the story saying that the reportage – if one could call it that – was done the way it was done thanks to the diktat of the Labour Electoral Conference.

Is this 2008 Malta or the Stalinist Soviet Union? Do the gentlemen on the commission think that Labour supporters are nincompoops? Do they have to be protected from the evil face and nefarious words of Shultz? The debate about whether if was right of not to have Shultz endorse Muscat should have featured prominently on the Labour media and not banished from it.

Inside (pages) or just outside

Such shenanigans are not the prerogative of the Labour media. The media of the Partit Nazzjonalista should shoulder their fair share of blunders in the area. A certain Mr Azzopardi died in hospital after he was taken there by the police because of injuries he suffered, the cause of which is the subject of two different inquiries. The Malta Today had broken the story. There were several follow ups. On one particular day all of Malta’s newspapers except In-Nazzjon had the story on the front page with extensive coverage continuing on the inside pages. In-Nazzjon has a tiny bit of a story on one of the inside pages.

More. During the 31 March celebrations a group of left wingers did a kind of noisy public protest. Net TV did not even have one single word about the protest though it had extensive coverage about the celebrations.

The Maltese political media should at least have a modicum of respect for their audiences if they do not have the desirable level of respect for the truthful reportage of events. It is not possible to censor stories today. The pluralistic media environment we live in together with the Internet, emails, SMSs etc have made mince meat out of censorship. Tackle the hard stories instead of hiding them dear colleagues in the political media and media bosses.

The Pope’s Passion

I recently spent two days in Rome participating in a seminar about theology and communications organised by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. The participants were invited to a private audience with the Pope at the Sala Clementina inside the Pontifical Palace. I was immensely impressed by the Pope’s chapel whose three walls and ceiling had been decorated by mosaics on the occasion of the Millennium. You feel surrounded by the sheer beauty of this fantastic work of art. Those mosaics are a visual theological treatise.

From there we moved on to the audience with the Pope where he spoke of the passion for truth that should characterise the media.

Pope Benedict, among other things, said:

"It is self-evident that at the heart of any serious reflection on the nature and purpose of human communications there must be an engagement with questions of truth. ... The art of communication is by its nature linked to an ethical value, to the virtues that are the foundation of morality. In the light of that definition, I encourage you, as educators, to nourish and reward that passion for truth and goodness that is always strong in the young".

Let the citizen beware

As you can see the Pope’s speech is the source of my title. I lambasted the local political media. But I think that economy with the truth is not just their monopoly or prerogative. Look at the number of corrections in our media and one could see either the shoddiness or the irresponsibility that several so-called journalists show. This is also true on the international level. Whole books have been published recounting stories printed in newspapers and other news outlets whose relationship to the truth is as close as Hitler’s love for the Jews.

The extreme commercialisation of the media and their politicisation are both enemies of the truth. Readers, listeners and viewers should confront the media by an attitude of mistrust.

Concluding I borrow the subtitle of a book my McManus: Let the citizen beware.