The article Maltese Media Accused Of Promoting Racism (March 23) reported that following “an in-depth content analysis”, the European Network Against Racism had concluded that “indirect racism was common in Maltese media”.
As long ago as 2006, Laura Boldrini, spokesman for The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, was tasked with a sensitisation campaign to help people understand the reality of migration and refugees in Malta.
When interviewed about the practical application and implications of her assignment, she stated: “The media play an important role in passing on the right message, which is why we are concerned with the fear that can create xenophobic attitudes and manipulate realities” and stressed, “Xenophobia, not refugees, is the threat”.
Considering that “proper reporting is important, without offering a stereotypical image of refugees”, it is a gaping shame therefore, that scant, if any, attempt is made to replicate or reflect her well-intentioned exhortations in the local print media.
Given instances where irregular immigrants are reported as having “offered no resistance”, how can one then rationally account for the blithe, yet widespread deployment of vivid military lexicon such as “round up, intercept, march, seize, nab, guard, fish out and force back”, punctuating what purports to be objective press reportage as opposed to feverishly fervent opinion pieces?
Picture the civil difference if you will, with the substitution by words such as “assemble, apprehend, accompany, take into custody, find, detain, recover and return”, respectively.
Professional reporters would do well to remember that whereas the content of what they communicate to their readers may faithfully convey what they think, the tenor, tone and nuance of it might likewise highlight that which they really feel; serving in turn, to undermine how they would wish to be perceived.
Though unwitting, routine sensationalism of this sort, evoking images of “alien invasions” of Fortress Malta during the Great Siege, is eerily symptomatic of an endemic tendency to betray a subliminal recriminatory obsession with past traumatic travails – an underlying fixation as deeply ingrained in the national mindset as it is perniciously pervasive.
A nation seemingly unwilling to discern, address, clarify, reconcile, effect closure on and surmount the undeclared subconscious baggage of the exacting asperities of its history, and be at serene peace with itself, is inevitably condemned to being shackled, trapped, stultified and stymied by it – and unable therefore, to redeem its potential nor indeed do justice to itself or others.