“The findings of this report should put EU officials on high alert: media freedom and pluralism are under attack across the EU, and in some cases they are in an existential battle against overtly undemocratic governments.”
This quote is from the executive summary of the latest annual Media Freedom Report, which is compiled by a coalition of civil society organisations known as the Civil Liberties Union for Europe.
The 81-page report goes into considerable detail about this existential battle. It was published earlier today.
First, it lays out the dire context: the fascist renaissance spreading across both EU and national politics as well as the hypertensive environment surrounding the war in Ukraine are both piling pressure onto an already fragmented media landscape.
The report also pins hope on the significant legislative changes which have been made on an EU level, though it warns that “many member states seem unready – if not unwilling – to fully and faithfully enforce” the EU’s brand new press freedom laws: the European Media Freedom Act and the anti-SLAPP directive known as ‘Daphne’s law‘.
In Malta’s case, several key areas of concern were highlighted: a high concentration of media ownership, a lack of transparency in media ownership, recorded verbal attacks against journalists, the abusive distribution of state advertising and funding, political interference within public broadcasting, and the government’s steadfast refusal of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.
This isn’t the kind of report that tells you anything new. It’s the kind of report that looks at the bigger picture and reminds you just how bad things really are.
“A free and pluralistic media ecosystem is necessary for strong and stable democracy, and efforts by governments to weaken the rule of law and democratic institutions almost always start by seeking to control their country’s media landscape,” the report’s authors note.
The decline of the rule of law in Malta will forever be marked by the moment in which Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered. By then, it was already in full swing. In the eight years that passed since Daphne was assassinated, it only got steadily worse.
As a journalist, I couldn’t help but grimace when the authors of the Media Freedom Report reminded me that “according to the most recent Eurobarometer survey, trust in Malta’s written press remains the lowest in Europe (40%), 20 percentage points lower than the EU average,” later adding that radio and TV fared slightly better at 46% and 50% respectively while trust in news websites stood at just 38%.
I’ve been writing about the decline of the local press since this project was launched. In fact, this website was explicitly set up to fight back against the tide of government propaganda that seeks to drown out all dissent.
I wouldn’t be doing the readers of this website any service by repeating what is already well known. What I’d like to do instead is zoom out to a bird’s eye view of things.
A few years ago, these kinds of reports were meant to serve as flashing warning signs, like urgent messages that pop up on your screen when your device is overheating.
We are past the warning threshold. This isn’t a car trailing perilously at the edge of a hill – it’s careening straight down into a nearby ravine.
The lack of fair distribution of state funding and advertising for the press severely distorted the market.
Constant political interference within the public broadcaster and its favourable coverage of the state’s operations has solidified the perception that the government is invulnerable to criticism.
Prime minister Robert Abela’s repeated attacks on independent outlets – aided and abetted by satellite apparatchiks – continue to normalise the expression of hostility towards journalists.
The government’s disingenuous transposition of Daphne’s law proves that Abela’s administration is only interested in ticking boxes and patting itself on the back for doing the bare minimum it can get away with.
These are all factors that actively contribute to the distrust shown towards the Maltese press.
It must also be acknowledged, however, that the abysmal standards which we’ve set as our benchmark in this field also leave a lot to be desired.
Ultimately, every country’s media sector is directly influenced by the character of the few powerful individuals that set the agenda of the industry’s titans.
Trust in the free press in Malta was systemically undermined by the government. The remnants of that trust were squandered by editors who stood by as their platforms turned into purveyors of sponsored slop while singular efforts to hold the government accountable continue to be dwarfed by frivolous, superficial reporting.
In this existential battle against unprincipled, powerful men who view the rule of law as an inconvenient obstacle to their grand plans, the press must claw back its readers’ trust by being as close to the truth as one can possibly get.
That soul-searching exercise must begin with a painful realisation: in the disinformation age, our readers have no innate reason to trust us. It is up to us to convince them that we are reporting the truth and admitting our shortcomings whenever we fail to do so.
At this stage, anything short of that standard will be fatal – not just for any individual outlet, but for the industry in its entirety.