I find it odd to see how some rather inconsequential news items or political utterances are made to dominate our papers. There’s the PN obsession du jour with Gaddafi’s links to Labour in the 1980s and any party activities sponsored by Libyan money.

For all we know, both the PN and the PL are being bankrolled by dodgy dictators or shady business interests today- Claire Bonello

Practically every exponent in the PN stable has churned out an article about the topic. All of them wax hysterical about the lack of transparency of political party funding 30-odd years ago, but ignore the fact that we still have no laws regulating party donations. For all we know, both the PN and the PL are being bankrolled by dodgy dictators or shady business interests today, yet there’s not a peep from the government about changing this state of affairs.

Besides flogging that particular dead horse, we are also being treated to the saga of Franco Mercieca’s priority pass on the Gozo Channel. If this riveting tale has passed you by, you’re not missing much.

It mainly revolves around whether Mercieca – an eye surgeon based in Gozo and who works in Malta (and who is also a prospective Labour candidate), should be eligible for a such a pass. In the past, a priority pass was issued in his name, and this pass has been subsequently withdrawn. Mercieca is questioning whether it has been only his pass which was withdrawn, or whether others have been accorded the same treatment.

So far, so yawn-inducing you might say. Should Mercieca be afforded privileged status? If not, why should others still be able to queue-jump and not him? And ultimately – why is this nontroversy hogging media space, with readers getting daily updates about the matter – like some warped form of Maltese soap opera?

Then there was the whole fuss kicked up because Austin Gatt said that the PN would govern in perpetuity – or at least for the next 20 years. Instead of passing it off as the brash type of remark someone like Silvio Berlusconi would make, the commentariat has taken this off-the-cuff statement as some sort of declaration of war and made it the subject of much in-depth analysis and gloomy prognosis.

I have no doubt that if another minister, insignificant backbencher or political relic from either side of the political divide had to make a similarly trivial comment, it would be pored over with equal intensity.

Now I realise that the papers can’t be a politics-free zone and that declarations about policies that politicians intend to follow and initiatives they mean to champion, have a certain bearing on our lives. I’m also aware of the fact that we can’t only be reading and discussing matters of great intellectual import and that the inclusion of less weighty snippets of information about politicians may spice up our reading fare marginally.

In this, local media outfits are working on the lines of what happens abroad, trying to personalise news and present it in a way which is more attractive to the reader. But I can’t help wondering whether this media obsession with politicians and the wall-to-wall coverage of their utterances and activities, is terribly interesting to those who aren’t political anoraks.

Despite the extensive reporting of everything politician-related, the great majority of people realise that not every facet of their life is dominated by politics. There are whole spheres of people’s lives in which the faux pas and gaffes of politicians have much less relevance than they are made out to have.

Although the positions taken up by political figures may impinge on our lives, I would say that a person’s effort and application in any given sphere would do much more to improve his employment prospects, his health and his chances in life.

In view of this, it’s hard to make out why we continue to get swamped with political trivia, supposedly outrageous declarations, and mini-scandals. Wouldn’t more fact-based reporting about issues be more relevant to your average citizen than Gatt’s braying?

And does Mercieca’s priority pass matter much in the grand scheme of things?

How life-changing is the political bickering about cosying up to Gaddafi? Wouldn’t it be a tad more relevant to find out what the political parties intend to do in future when faced with undemocratic regimes with which Malta has commercial ties?

Of course, we can’t place all the blame for the obsession with political trivia at the media’s feet. If there is a constant supply of inanities, trumped-up scandals and gaffes, it’s there to satisfy a demand somewhere.

Maybe we can’t help being somewhat drawn to reading about such things, in much the same way people are instinctively drawn to gawp at accidents.

But unless we get a bit more clued-up about the real issues and start creating a demand for more substantive political reporting, we’re going to perpetuate a vicious cycle where the media generates non-stories about political tiffs and trivialities and we hoover it up, creating a demand for more of the same.

Blair spin doctor Alistair Campbell once railed against the “cynical” sods of “the babble industry” who are “obsessed with the trivia”.

As far as possible we have to try not to sustain that industry and the cynics who militate within it.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt