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Well, the MTA board has resigned. Good, brave and proud men. That is how it should always be.
In the meantime the Labour party has declared war on Maurice Tanti Burlò, the veteran cartoonist.
And the British High Commissioner refuses outright to provide this newspaper with the names of those who have been awarded the Chevening scholarships when faced with questions about who gets the scholarships. Well, I have always had a funny feeling about toffs in general.
But back to basics. I do not quite understand why MTA chairman Sam Mifsud and his cherubic looks are still around. I guess being chairman of such a prestigious authority is more important than coming to grips with one’s own limitations. In normal circumstances it is the captain who takes responsibility for cock-ups, not the soldiers.
But with Francis at the helm, things sort of get inverted. We did say that Romwald Lungaro Mifsud was not the man for the job. So is the youngish Sam Mifsud the right replacement?
Men who are in their early thirties and take up such important jobs are usually strikingly bright lads. I am sure Sam Mifsud passed all the IQ tests, but what we really need in this job is a go-getter, and not someone who uses up his first days as chairman to hound his board.
In an interview in The Times he says the problem with our tourism is not the product or the brand. Really, Sam? Have you ever tried being a tourist in Malta, Sam?
What we needed for chairman of the MTA was a charismatic man of experience with drive and vision – and somebody who does not need to run both his business and the country’s tourism agenda at the same time.
The survivor in this veritable mess is the tourism minister. Needless to say, Francis Zammit Dimech has a survival kit, some sixty times bigger than my ego (which is saying something…).
In another country such as Britain where cartoons portray Tony Blair popping out of Bill Clinton’s zip (in the broadsheet The Guardian), Zammit Dimech would have been a backbencher. In Malta, he is still cabinet minister.
The second event of the week was the Labour party’s reaction to Maurice Tanti Burlò’s cartoon. Their press statement called for an apology from the Times’ editor Ray Bugeja over a cartoon depicting Sant as someone called Alfossa (fossa translating as cesspit), to which scatological reference the Malta Labour Party has taken great umbrage.
Anyway, we all know that Mr Tanti Burlò is no admirer of Sant, but so what? Since when are cartoonists supposed to be in love with politicians?
It is true that Labour stands out as being disadvantaged with the Times. But what do you expect from the publishing house razed to the ground by Labour thugs after a scathing attack on the Times in a meeting held by the one and only Duminku Mintoff in 1979?
The crowd then was supposed to have been celebrating 30 years of Duminku as leader of the Labour party. Instead they went berserk and after his speech went off to celebrate Dear Leader’s grand tenure by burning the Times to the ground.
To demonise Sant is not a sensible thing to do. But then the best policy in such a campaign is weather the storm.
I was surprised to what the maltastar.com editorial had to say about cartoonists in the “Western democratic societies”:
“Any physical defect a politician might have is not made fun of. The cartoonists also do not get personal and they never engage in mudslinging or name-calling. In short, any cartoonist worthy of his name stops short of going overboard and exercises self-restraint.”
I am not quite sure which western world he is talking about (a Sergio Leone western perhaps?) but young Kurt Farrugia was surely not talking about the same civilized, democratic west we all know about – the one in which cartoonists should be free to reinforce the provocative message that an uninhibited exchange of opinions is vital for a democracy.
Any politician with a toupée in the west stands to be ridiculed. In Malta this is not the case, but the time will come when politicians have to expect everything. Freedom of the press is not something qualified and determined by politicians or their blemishes. Those who say it is wrong are the same ones who continue to believe that yesterday’s world is tomorrow’s world.
And Malta does have its own mediocre unwritten code of ethics. When I published a cartoon some 15 years ago with the Pope kissing the tarmac at Luqa with the Archbishop looking on and saying that tarmac was being sold as a parcel of Church Land, the readers’ reaction was not very nice.
If I had to repeat the same cartoon today, the reaction would be very different.
But cartoonists are not the only ones facing censure. The Institute of Maltese Journalists were very silly to suggest to Alfred Sant to seek legal remedy if he felt that he was aggrieved by the nature of the cartoon. All we need now is the IGM advising politicians to institute more libels!
Their statement was signed by Joe Vella, the former editor of the defunct socialist weekly Weekend Chronicle, whose hallmark for censure and intolerance in the mid-eighties continues to prove that the IGM is in no longer in any position to represent journalists in Malta. It is out of synch with the needs of dynamic press. I suggest it takes up needlework as its grand mission.
Labour has a real chance of being the next government – so it must start acting like a government-in-waiting. Tanti Burlò may have his prejudices, but the MLP must simply shed its inferiority complex.
In 1998, an article fuelled by Daphne Caruana Galizia retraced the separation case of Alfred Sant. The article, appearing in The Malta Independent on Sunday, was definitely published without any clear appreciation of the sensitivity of the subject in question. But it was not factually incorrect. It had been simply catalysed by the nature of that journalism that lives off the lives of public figures.
The shareholders of that newspaper, which included companies owned by my great pal Bertu Mizzi, chose to kick out the editor, Ray Bugeja. Today Ray Bugeja is the same editor who published the ‘Alfossa’ cartoon. Strangely enough, back then they did not ask Daphne to stop writing. She writes in The Malta Independent to this day.
This was 1998. Alfred Sant was Prime Minister. And many of the Independent’s shareholders were in no rush to clash with the powers that be over something which in their view also was a personal and offensive article.
Ray Bugeja was kicked out but he later returned to his former employer, the Times, and eventually to his former post as editor.
When faced with flak by the Labour party over Tanti Burlò’s cartoon, the Times’ management said they would look into the matter. What they should have said is that its editorial freedom was in the nature of the free press.
Faced with a prospective Labour government, I am not too sure what the Times management would have said instead. Would they retrace the misguided steps of the not-so-brave Independent shareholders and kick Ray Bugeja out? Who knows?
The Chevening Scholarships are dished out to those individuals who have excellent academic backgrounds. But does it stop here. No, it does not.
It is clear that the recipients of these scholarships originate from individuals who have the financial means to pay for their sons and daughters education three times over. Additionally, their elder siblings are usually Chevening alumni.
The policy is clear, even though the British High Commissioner has been very funny in his replies about the matter, having candidly stated “I have other things I am paid to do, including run a scheme this year which you are welcome to criticise.”
Basically, Her Majesty’s government’s policy seems to emphasize that if there is any investment to be had in education, it must be in people who will be influential in the future.
Rich, coming from a country which preaches equality and a fair chance for all.
A provocative note was raised by a reader in a letter sent to me: “Mr Balzan, do you not think that politicians have the nerve to withdraw and reduce stipends for Maltese university students whilst their children are awarded very financially advantageous scholarships?”
A valid point, more so when our politicians are arguing about means testing as a future instrument for issuing university stipends.
But if we ever wanted proof of the quality and fair selection process, I should take you back to the mid-nineties. A story in a newspaper I worked for: the British High Commissioner of the day, Brian Hitch, was reported to have asked an applicant for a British Council scholarship: “For which party did you vote?”
The applicant, a lawyer, today works in a top government agency along with other Chevening scholars. He did not get his scholarship, by the way. His father had been a Labour candidate in the fifties.
The story, published in the newspaper Alternattiva, was obviously ignored by everyone. Brian Hitch never came back to comment about his outrageous comment and life went on.
At least now we know that it is not only the Maltese that should be ashamed of their habit of dumping meritocracy.
The launch of a Maltese newspaper has always been on the agenda. Illum will be a new Sunday newspaper and a very different one indeed. It will not carry the same stories as MaltaToday, it will target a very different audience, and it will retain the hallmark of independence and objectivity that Mediatoday is so proud of.
Maltese is the lingua franca for the majority of the Maltese. There is no independent Maltese-language newspaper. This is the first independent Maltese-language weekly in ages.
For three decades we have had newspapers in Maltese run by political parties or the Church. This is different. This is run by to shareholders with a mission statement that binds them to put the reader before everything else.
Audacious, just like MaltaToday, but it will appeal to a different audience, play a different tune, and communicate with its readers in the language of the Maltese.
I must thank all those who woke up last Sunday to buy MaltaToday at 5am including my friend who asked me not to play God. In view of their loyalty to this newspaper I have decided not to mention them for the second week running.
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