Why Malta has a half free picture – Revel Barker
The best joke around NATO these days – and let’s take the opportunity to laugh at the situation, while we can – is: “We believed that Russia had the second best army. in the world: we now know that it is only the second best. army in Ukraine. “
One of the biggest problems, and I appreciate that there are many, is that we don’t know if Vladimir Putin knows how badly his general is doing. Sure, they won’t tell him.
But neither did his newspapers. Russian journalists do not report bad news about Russia. Putin is the state; the state is communist. And so are journalists.
I wrote here that when Mikhail Gorbachev was in charge I went to Moscow to try to introduce his journalists and editors to the idea of a free press. He introduced Glasnost, the policy that makes government more open and democratic. And I recounted how journalists didn’t want to. They did not want the freedom to criticize a communist regime because they were communists themselves.
What does this have to do with Malta? It’s just that Malta is going the same way.
We have a diverse picture in this country, which is a good thing. But half is not a free picture but a party picture. (I include the TV stations with the body of the ‘press’.)
And, worryingly, the majority of Maltese journalists like this: they are in favor of political ownership (and, therefore, control) of communication. In other words, spreading the news in this country is only half free. We have dozens of journalists writing what they have been told and, in any case, they have not written anything that reflects badly on their party.
What kind of journalists are they? Have they entered the business of wanting to inform their peers about national or world events? Or with the ambition to become a party speaker?
Any half-decent writer can follow the policy of his newspaper and even follow the party line in his writing. But if he wants to be called a reporter, he nevertheless understands the need to write a balanced report and his boss, if he is a journalist, understands the point of publishing it.
We have dozens of journalists who did not write anything that reflected badly on their party.– Revel Barker
That’s not the way it works here, though. As in Moscow, journalists will not write – and their editors will not publish – something that could show the party in a bad light… because they are supporters. They are not, any of them, journalists: they are party PROs.
Lord Northcliffe (1865-1922), who invented the (turned to the left) Daily Mirror and the (center right) Daily Mail, once said: “The news is what someone, somewhere, wants to suppress; the rest is advertising. “
Self-styled reporters should read this and stop, and think: not in journalism but in advertising.
If you are not telling the whole truth, you are telling a lie. If you see your role in life as kowtoving to political masters, or rewriting party hand-outs, get out of journalism and into politics. Write the leaflets yourself. Do you call yourself a journalist? No: you hack the party.
Thankfully, the other half of Maltese journalism can really call itself independent. He can say what he likes from both parties (or all of them): he praises the government – and the opposition – when it does something right and criticizes its mistakes, and acts effectively as the opposition when the second party (as is currently the case) would be. largely incompetent.
Even then, the government can influence the independents. Newspapers rely on their advertising revenue and the government spends heavily on advertising. It can feed more of it, and therefore more money, to those newspapers (and TV stations) that support it and less of it to those that do not.
And that, of course, is a waste of money because independent newspapers have higher readers than those controlled by the party.
When I worked in London, the head of the Special Branch (and these things know) told me: “There are more communists carrying papers on the Financial Times and more members of the Tory party on the Daily Mirror than on some other newspapers. . ”
None of this was reflected in the output.
It was what we call the Free Press.
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