Fr Colin Apap believes the Church media is biased towards the PN and says this could have an impact on the credibility of the Church’s voice in society. He spoke to Kurt Sansone.
When not presenting a radio programme or carrying out pastoral duties, Fr Colin Apap is listening to the Church radio station and browsing its online news portal.
For two whole weeks in April, the priest assiduously listened to the RTK news bulletins and followed the reporting on Newsbook, taking note of how the news was being conveyed.
It was not a newfound hobby but the fruit of multiple concerns that were reaching him from parishioners and others in the priesthood over what they feared was, he said, an overt political twist in the Church news organs.
He also drafted a nine-page report listing his observations and concerns, which he then sent Archbishop Charles Scicluna.
Fr Colin shows me the report when we meet at a cafeteria in Birżebbuġa. It is laced with references to news items and what he feels is the bias in the way they were reported.
The priest chosen by the Archbishop to oversee the reforms of the Church’s media, Fr Joe Borg, rebuts the conclusions and insists the analysis is flawed (see box below).
The report highlights instances when, according to Fr Colin, RTK and Newsbook relied on Daphne Caruana Galizia’s blog for its news, omitting at times the fact that the reports were allegations. This was primarily a reference to the claims that the Prime Minister’s wife owned Panama company Egrant.
On other aspects Fr Colin notes items that failed to make it to the news with the same prominence, despite their importance, such as Ms Caruana Galizia’s initial public statements that she would not testify in front of the inquiring magistrate in the Egrant case.
He also questions the choice of certain individuals – all with a Nationalist Party background – appointed to head the Church’s media organisation. “The fact that they all have the same political background does not in itself constitute lack of balance. But I can imagine what the result would have been had the situation been the opposite.”
In the summary, Fr Colin explains his concern: “The changes that happened in the Maltese Church’s media strengthens the conviction of some that the Church forms part of the strategy of one political party against the other.”
The report is a scathing critique of the Church’s media but Fr Colin says he is only going public now about his concerns because he did not want his words to be used during the election campaign. He was promised a meeting by the Archbishop’s media delegate sometime in summer but that is as far as his concerns have gone.
He says the report reflects the worry expressed in private by many parishioners. “I was receiving complaints from people about what they believed was a bias towards the Nationalist Party and its point of view but I wanted to assess this for myself, which is why I carried out the analysis.”
Fr Colin’s biggest concern is that the Archbishop and the Church get tarred with the same brush of disdain as a result of what he describes as slanted news reporting.
“I fear that people could end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater because Catholics will not distinguish between what the Archbishop says and the Church’s media people,” Fr Colin tells me.
We run the risk of having the only credible voice being seriously compromised
Describing Mgr Scicluna as an example of openness, a person with clarity of thought and action, humorous and independent of a two-tribe mentality, he says these qualities became “obfuscated”.
“My experience in meeting practising Catholics is that they are very often unreservedly critical, sometimes aggressively so and often unjust but, especially during the electoral campaign, through the Church’s media, the bishop was portrayed as being one-sided, biased and unable to understand the mood of the common people.”
He says this is an unfortunate state of affairs because in a country where the government is very strong and the temptation to abuse is high, it helps to have a strong Opposition, a reference that goes beyond the political understanding of the word.
“Unfortunately, the [parliamentary] Opposition is in tatters and it will take some years to retrench. The only strong voice is the Catholic Church. But it’s a big blunder that the Church is perceived by many as hopping on to the PN’s bandwagon, ignoring the appeals, the anger, the insults of wronged practising Catholics,” he says.
And this, he insists, becomes a more pertinent concern at a time when serious matters such as those linked to life, marriage, sex, governance and minority rights make it on the public agenda.
“When the local Church or the bishop or any representative will speak about these serious issues, as is bound to happen, we run the risk of having the only credible voice being seriously compromised.”
He pulls out a newspaper cartoon from 2008 that shows him struggling to get out of a box over which the then Archbishop was sitting.
The cartoon was published at a time when the Church publicly cautioned priests against endorsing politicians. The general warning was made soon after a video clip of Fr Colin had been uploaded to the internet endorsing then Labour Party leadership hopeful Joseph Muscat.
“I was chastised but during the same period, and well before the character reference I made for Joseph [Muscat], who I knew on a personal level, other high profile priests were actively involved with the PN,” he says, adding some priests were more equal than others.
He then jokes about being sent abroad by the Church as a sabbatical to reflect on his words, as had happened to the other leftist firebrand, Dominican priest Mark Montebello, some years ago.
The discussion takes a personal twist as Fr Colin reflects on the religion he is a minister of.
“Our religious practices, while commendable and useful, provide relief not ‘relieve’. Relief is when one’s conscience is acquiesced but ‘relieve’ is freedom, detachment, respect of others’ way of thinking and reasoning.” Picking on what I suggest is a thorny subject for the Church, Fr Colin says religious ‘relieve’ helps gay people to be free. But ‘relieve’ also helps the Church to consider gay people as a minority to be free from dogmatic categorisation.
“I am very much aware that I am still not free. I am aware of my dogmatic stands, bias and hypocrisy. It’s a life-long process. I have not arrived there yet. God is not finished with me yet. I do want to be free and I realise I cannot do this alone; I need others to cope with life within the Church and beyond it,” he confesses.
Fr Colin enters into another moment of reflection as I ask about an ageing priesthood that may not be so accommodating to the reforming voice of Pope Francis.
“It’s not a question of age but of mindset. Fr Joseph Borg Micallef from Floriana, who died recently, was the oldest priest but his advanced age enabled him to be a free man, not conditioned by dogmatic thinking, rigidity, pigeon-holing people and painting situations in black and white.”
Fr Colin recalls his last meeting with the priest at the Dar tal-Kleru in Birkirkara, a home for elderly priests, a week before he died. Using a wheelchair and with a computer in front of him, Fr Borg Micallef was still sending emails to priests and laypeople, updating them on the mind frame of Pope Francis. “When Dun Ġużepp saw me for the last time he was holding a book in his hand. It was about Manwel Dimech [the leftist intellectual at the turn of the 20th century, who had been excommunicated by the Church and exiled by the British]. ‘You know, Colin’, he said, showing me the book, ‘he was right, we were wrong’.”
Roll forward almost 100 years and the search for truth, the yearning to understand what is right and wrong, remains as relevant for this priest in front of me.
Report’s methodology deeply flawed – Fr Joe Borg
Entrusted with the reforms to the Church media, Fr Joe Borg says the methodology adopted by Fr Colin is “deeply flawed” and his report contains factual mistakes.
“I totally reject the main argument that RTK and Newsbook formed part of the PN propaganda. This is absolutely not true. Our reporting was factual and the programmes gave space to all political parties.”
Fr Joe says that a social media analysis of the various news portals carried out during the election campaign by Icon and Minely – known as the Big Data Analysis – showed that the engagement of users with Newsbook was equally shared between PL and PN sympathisers.
“It is rich of Fr Colin to try and judge the Church media when it is publicly known that he is part of the furniture of the Labour Party media,” Fr Joe says.
He notes that the broadcasting regulator did not find fault with what RTK did throughout the campaign and Newsbook’s audience was 800 per cent more than what it was in the previous election.
“The regulator was satisfied and audiences were happy. If Fr Colin was disappointed one wonders why,” Fr Joe says.