Last week the media reported two unrelated stories. The Times of Malta reported that ‘Malta plummets 12 places in press freedom league’. Just two days or so before the media carried a report of a press conference by Minister Edward Scicluna informing us that government would be sending people a tax rebate varying from €40 to €60.
The news that Malta dropped 12 places in the Reporters Without Borders’ 2019 press freedom index should have been worrying enough for all freedom lovers. But worse news was on the way. Malta has fallen 31 places since 2016.
And if we go back to 2013 Malta’s press freedom ranking has plummeted a staggering 32 places. In 2013 Malta ranked in the 45 place while in 2018 it made it to number 77. Malta sits below countries such as Togo, Mongolia, Tunisia, Georgia and Armenia. Awful isn’t it? No one should try to find solace in Hungary and Bulgaria ranking worse than us in the EU index.
Those who expected a public outcry were met by public silence. More people talked to me about the tax rebate than about the meteoritic fall in the press freedom index. Moreover, I am informed even on social media there were more comments about the tax rebate than about the new disgraceful rating.
The Reporters Without Borders’ study touched Malta’s democratic core. The second touched, albeit incidentally, people’s pockets. The rebate is quite modest. The maximum one can get is €60 which cannot buy one more than four pizzas and four soft drinks in a discreet village pizzeria. Could the reaction (or lack of it) indicate that there are people who treasure four pizzas more than press freedom?
Could the reaction (or lack of it) indicate that there are people who treasure four pizzas more than press freedom?
Probably there are people similarly inclined. One could quote Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Money which, like other material needs such as food, ranks on the lower end of this hierarchy is preferred more than freedom and good governance which grace the upper echelons of Maslow’s ladder. Nothing new as Moses himself experienced this when he tried to free the Hebrews from Egypt.
It is also important to remember that Maslow used to write that humankind would want to live by bread alone when there is no bread. This is not Malta’s case. There is a lot of ‘bread’ though the numbers of those for whom bread is lacking is on the increase. It could be that the abundance of ‘bread’ (not just bread for some and crumbs for many) has become the new opium of the people alienating them from many other important needs.
Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People presents the inhabitants of a town in affluent Norway who also chose ‘bread’ over press freedom. (The same choice was made by the journalists themselves.) When faced by a whistleblower eager to reveal that the town’s supposedly health-giving springs were in fact infectious springs, they shut him up as that would have affected negatively their income.
On that occasion the audience was the enemy of press freedom. Today audiences even in Malta try to shut up or simply ignore an inquisitive press. Journalists who write politically inconvenient truths are rubbished on the social media in an attempt to intimidate them.
But the most heinous threat lies elsewhere. People today believe that they enjoy the freedom to communicate and receive communications so they don’t bother a lot about whether or not the traditional and professional press has a similar freedom. The internet and social networks have given them that illusion. Today there is a lot of tripe and junk news on Facebook which has become people’s daily nourishment. And junk news drives out professional news. Ask journalists who sweat it out working on investigative stories what frustration grips them when their work gets less views than stupid click baits.
Moreover, the manipulation of news on Facebook by professional propagandists and paid trolls is subtle and thus more pernicious. The risks of this manipulation are, according to Ward, the creation of a democratic ‘irrational rule of the insufficiently informed’.
We cannot have a free press without ethical journalists. Similarly we cannot have a free press without ethical audiences that is audiences who thirst for fair, accurate and truthful information even when it is disconcerting to their established views and beliefs.
Neither can press freedom flourish when the Justice Minister with a straight face utters terminological inexactitudes (to borrow a phrase introduced in 1906 by Winston Churchill) about the state of press freedom in Malta. Whoever colluded with Henley and Partners to take SLAPP actions against Daphne Caruana Galizia and left the threat of SLAPP actions hanging like Damocles’s sword over the head of Maltese journalists cannot give us lessons on press freedom.