Let me be very clear. I am not writing this column in the spirit of an upstart crow.
My aim isn’t to take others down so I can carve a niche out of the bones of their uninspiring careers. I hate writing about fellow journalists because it is time that could have been used to hold politicians accountable. I’d much rather focus my energy on the latter, because politicians are vested with formal power. Politicians’ decisions shape lives. Journalists merely document them.
Though that may sound dismissive of the power of the media, it is actually highlighting it. Through how we document the world around us and the people who live in it, journalists mold public opinion. A politician shapes lives – a journalist is responsible for informing the public whether that ‘shaping’ is going well or not.
In an ideal world, people should be able to reasonably assume that journalists and the newsrooms they work for would never compromise credibility, accountability, and transparency. One would also hope that a journalist would choose that profession because they actually want to hold power accountable, thereby serving as a public watchdog.
As you may have noted by now, however, Malta is far from ideal. Specifically, our media landscape is certainly far from ideal. In spite of my distaste for writing about fellow journalists, it would be irresponsible of me not to call out bad workmanship when I see it. It would be like an architect noticing a precarious situation on a building site and not warning the neighbours about it. The analogy becomes even worse when you consider that the building site in question is the entire country’s judgement.
On Thursday, Newsbook’s editor Matthew Xuereb was invited to interview prime minister Robert Abela. The interview was broadcast live on party channels and featured the usual grim audience one would find at a typical Labour Party activity. The party activity was held in Valletta’s Upper Barrakka Gardens.
It is crucial to note that besides serving as Newsbook’s editor, Xuereb also serves as the president of the IĠM, the only formally organised entity in the country which is supposed to represent journalists.
From the outset, it should be obvious that the setting and the tone of the interview are all wrong. The featured photo of this article – which was doing the rounds on the prime minister’s official Facebook page – immediately conveys a sense of unnerving familiarity between two individuals who are at loggerheads by virtue of their respective professions.
Journalists should never become cosy with powerful individuals because it automatically blunts our ability to do our job. As human beings, we are reflexively less disposed towards holding others accountable when we’ve become personally familiar with them. This is not rocket science – it is one of the core tenets of journalism.
One of the best journalism films ever made, The Post, documents how The Washington Post had effectively put its entire existence on the line by choosing to publish the Pentagon Papers, classified US military data that illustrated the failures of the Vietnam War. The papers, which were originally commissioned by secretary of defence Robert McNamara, were buried shortly after the report was compiled.
Katharine Graham – the publisher of the Washington Post at the time, memorably portrayed by the inimitable Meryl Streep – was faced with a dire choice. Publishing the leaked documents meant defying a federal court’s injunction and invoking the wrath of the president of the United States, who at the time was Richard Nixon.
In this scene, Graham is forced to come to terms with this choice when the Post’s editor, Ben Bradlee (also brilliantly played by Tom Hanks), confirms that their newspaper is about to get its hands on all 4,000 pages of the classified leak. Pointing to a picture of Graham with her late husband and former president John F Kennedy and his wife, Bradlee implies Graham was too friendly with the Kennedys, shortly before admitting that he’d made the same mistake by thinking of the president as a friend.
“We can’t be both, we have to choose. And that’s the point. The days of smoking cigars together down at Pennsylvania Avenue are over. McNamara’s study proves that. The way they lied…the way they lied…those days have to be over. We have to be the check over their power. If we don’t hold them accountable, then my God – who will?” – Ben Bradlee, The Post
Though interviewing the prime minister in a historical garden in Valletta is not exactly blowing the lid off a US government conspiracy, the same principle applies. The mere perception of familiarity between the press and the government is already bad enough in its own right, even without considering just how lukewarm the interview itself was. Matthew Xuereb could suddenly become the world’s fiercest journalist overnight, and it wouldn’t matter: this photo would still come back to haunt his credibility.
The prime minister’s social media page is already extracting out of context soundbites from this interview, which is usually the only real reason why Abela ever does an interview with a journalist who can pass off as ‘independent’. Abela did the same exact thing with MaltaToday’s executive editor Kurt Sansone back when half the country wanted to kick his arse after seeing how he treated Isabelle Bonnici.
There was no bite to any of the questions that were asked. Over and over, Abela was allowed to get away with misleading or outright false statements.
At no point in time does the interviewer force the interviewee to acknowledge that the root problem of all the various issues discussed in the interview – the hospitals concession deal, our faltering electricity grid, poverty and cost of living, the working conditions of third country nationals, the Labour Party’s ongoing political crisis, the non-existent media reform – is the deep-rooted corruption which flourished under two successive Labour administrations.
Instead, Abela got to flesh out his clearly scripted responses in detail, much to the applause of the party faithful seated in front of him.
The prime minister was not challenged about the real reason why Abela cannot appoint anyone from Cabinet to the post of EU Commissioner, that reason being that far too many Cabinet members are at risk of being held accountable for criminal activity which occurred on their watch. Abela just said that “it would be a mistake” to remove “experienced and talented” individuals from Cabinet for such a post, as if he was talking about sending them on a beer run and not nominating one of them to one of the most vital posts anyone could hope to serve the country in.
The prime minister was not challenged about the fact that he constantly kept referring to disgraced former health minister Chris Fearne and Central Bank governor Edward Scicluna as individuals who displayed integrity and who “put the country’s interests first”, even though we all know that all they ever valued was their own political ambition.
The prime minister got to gloss over the real cost associated with the government’s disastrous energy infrastructure decisions, including its current drive to temporarily secure Malta’s power distribution network with the use of diesel-fired generators across the island. As Abela went into overdrive selling the government’s efforts to secure supply in the early years of Muscat’s administration – through their corrupt deal with Electrogas – Xuereb failed to challenge him about the environmental and rule of law costs that we all paid upfront for their shortsightedness.
Abela even got to propagate a myth that has been statistically debunked so many times it is a miracle anyone still attempts to resurrect it: the falsehood that the creation of wealth in the country automatically means that it will trickle down to the average worker, when we all know it never actually does since the owners of that wealth tend to siphon it off via offshore jurisdictions, hidden trusts, and questionable asset management.
Abela is not held accountable for his government’s direct role in the exploitation of foreign workers. Instead, he gets raucous applause from his audience. He spoke at length about the “strong sense of optimism” he claims to see within the Labour Party, even though his own Cabinet members seem to have several newsrooms on speed dial to complain about him and his leadership.
At around the 37-minute mark, Xuereb remembers that he is the president of the IĠM and asks Abela how come we’ve never heard anything about the media reform he had promised. And that is exactly when the prime minister reminds him who’s in charge. He lies through his teeth about his government’s fraudulent media reform while blaming the opposition for the failure to implement these laws, and he gets away with that, too.
“You were one of the experts on that committee,” Abela remarks wryly, pointing out that Xuereb himself had legitimised the government’s attempts at pretending it is reforming the sector and that the government had used that committee’s feedback and claimed it as their own.
That is exactly why it is never a good idea to get in bed with the government, especially when we are talking about a government that has oh so clearly shown its total disdain for fairness, honesty, integrity, and rule of law itself, the very foundation of what a democracy is supposed to be built on. You cannot expect that a government-appointed committee is going to be a valid pathway to address corruption and media freedom issues which are directly linked with that same government.
I could go on and on but I think I’ve proven my point beyond any reasonable doubt.
This interview is not what journalism looks like, and I hate the fact that every time one of us does this kind of interview, we are all dragged down into this abyss of public ridicule. Anyone with at least two brain cells can see that this was a scripted walk in the park, and anyone with at least four of those will be inevitably wondering what the interviewer is actually getting out of it. Answers to real questions certainly isn’t the order of business here, so what is it?
The whole point of this website is to open up a desperately needed new frontier in Maltese journalism, one that steers the conversation as far away as possible from this kind of ‘stitch up masquerading as an interview’ situation.
We do not make commercial considerations. We only make decisions in the public interest, and hope that the public repays our efforts with their generosity (on that note, consider donating if you haven’t already). I genuinely don’t know how long I can keep this up without your support, not with this kind of boot-licking going around.
All I know for sure is that I will keep doing it until I can’t anymore.
When we said that our journalism is irreverent, we meant it. I ask for your help to keep it that way not just through financial contributions, but by also making it a point to differentiate. Remember that just because there are journalists who talk, act, and behave like puppets on a string, doesn’t automatically mean that we’re all like that.
We are nothing without your trust, and you can rest assured that I won’t forget that anytime soon.
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My thoughts exactly Julian….and that is why my only regular reads are CAP and The Shift.
The rest, as you aptly put it, are bootlickers or worse.
Keep up the good work.