From the chill cast by a journalist’s assassination to a financial squeeze, the independent media and investigative journalism are facing severe constraints.

Malta’s fall of 12 notches in this year’s World Press Freedom Index has generated spots of criticism of the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF), compilers of the annual index, who have been accused of partiality, shallowness and ignorance of the cultural and historical milieu in which media freedom has to be assessed. The charge has been made, for example, that Malta’s media is no less free now than five years ago, so what accounts for the slippage in freedom in the index?

Statistically, Malta’s slippage of 32 places over the past two years has been among the sharpest in the world. Some have peddled the sophistry that RSF is uninformed on the workings of politics and media in Malta. Others have posited that this is a statistical blip following the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia, encouraging us to take comfort in the fallacy that her assassination was an aberration that has limited bearing on wider media freedom.

The wider fallout of the assassination is a breach in the psychological barrier: the idea that a journalist can be killed for his or her work in Malta. That has cast a chill on journalism that will only begin to lift if the mastermind is brought to justice and a public process establishes wider accountability to prevent a repeat. 

Concurrent escalation in denigration of the media on social media mostly – in part driven by the politics of populism – has been making the working environment more menacing. This brooding environment is not limited to Malta: the EU-funded Index on Censorship has in its recent report catalogued intensifying incidents against journalists as well as governments’ tightening of control on State media in some peripheries of Europe.

Daphne’s slaying has also generated greater international scrutiny on Malta’s media, which has been found wanting.

Although, as the government pointed out, the number of libel suits has gone down – partly thanks to a new media law passed last year that widened the legal wiggle room – Malta’s media faces complex and growing threats. 

Instead of devising policies that strengthen the media to perform its crucial role in a democracy, the government is directly or indirectly engaged in weakening the independent media

Possibly the greatest current threat is financial conditioning, something that has given the government opportunity to extend its influence on the media. The industry has been beset by diminishing finances as advertising progressively migrates online.

There is also much free content online, including shallow or fake coverage masquerading as news, which serves to dilute professional news sources. This has diminished the influence and exposure of professional media, as well as advertising revenue on which media depends for financial viability.

This shrunken financial pool has led to cutbacks in budgets that have affected the quantity and quality of content. The pressure on journalists is to churn out stories in as little time as possible, disincentivising investigative journalism or in-depth stories that require time, effort and resources.

Freelancers have sustained the greatest brunt of cuts; surveys of freelance writers’ incomes make grimmer reading with every passing year. I have been a freelancer for more than 20 years, and the pattern of my yearly income is typical: my income peaked in 2007 and has since fallen by half, settling in the region of what a waiter would expect.

Freelancers have a valuable role because of greater propensity than staff journalists to pursue stories doggedly, and greater propensity to specialise. And news outlets have been losing some rich coverage because they can no longer afford freelancers as widely as in the past.

Overall, in the shrunken financial pool, government expenditure has become one of the major flows of revenue for media. And, in this situation, the government’s selective and opaque allocation of advertising seems to be having a perverse effect on media outlets in more precarious financial situations. Analysis of the empirical evidence suggests that certain media houses have compromised their independent-mindedness because of these indirect financial inducements.

These developments, coupled with usurpation of much media space by the political parties, have had the effect of narrowing the space, exposure and influence of independent media.

By functioning in large part as glorified propaganda outlets, political party media are a drag on the industry. Their shirking of objectivity undermines trust in the media as a whole; their propagandist programmes are a disservice to society. The political media also siphons some of the advertising revenue flowing into the shrunken financial pool, reducing further the financial flow for independent journalism.

The government’s influence is further expanded by its control on State TV through the appointment of proxies. This government has also increasingly taken to putting paid videos on Facebook – propagandist videos that have a stupefying effect, further narrowing the space of real journalism. 

So, instead of devising policies that strengthen the media to perform its crucial role in a democracy, the government is directly or indirectly engaged in weakening the independent media. The media was already weak through a combination of financial woes, professional underdevelopment (much content is of the ‘village newsletter’ type) and partisan pressures – the additional pressures are making the situation more beleaguering.

In this context we ignore the dizzying statistical plummet in the World Press Freedom Index at our peril.

The warnings by RSF are fitting, as is the finding of the Brussels-based Media Pluralism Monitor of a “very high risk” – at 83 per cent – to the political independence of the media in Malta. I will leave the last word to RSF, who wrote insightfully in this year’s Malta brief: “Investigative reporting is lacking, save for a handful of journalists working against the current, who are increasingly exposed to threats as a result of partisan division and loyalties.”

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece

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