David Friggieri | Sunday, 05 April 2009

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The independent columnist’s is a lonely life

There is an odd thing about Maltese newspapers which apparently entirely escapes most of us. And the odd thing is that, week in week out, politicians double up as columnists. I suspect that we have become so used to this practice that we accept it as entirely normal. It isn’t.
If you don’t believe me, start flipping through back issues of Le Monde, La Repubblica and The Guardian and tell me whether their regular columnists were ever called Nicolas Sarkozy or Gordon Brown. They will occasionally carry a speech delivered by, say, US President Obama or a reply by a local politician to an editorial but their pages are not systematically used by politicians as a convenient electoral platform.
The reason for this is obvious. Politicians have other very effective tools at their disposal to get their lofty message across: party conferences, press conferences, mass rallies, personal contact with constituents and – in Malta – two major TV and radio stations.
The purpose of an independent newspaper, regardless of whether it has a particular slant, is to provide insight into what politicians are doing and saying and to interpret what their words and actions might mean for society.
The current editorial policy of our English-language papers seems to be that things are perfectly hunky-dory as long as you finely balance out your Casa eulogy on page 5 with your Mizzi holy covenant on page 7 and your Brincat shot-at-goal on Tuesday with your Gatt counter-attack two days later.
Things don’t get much better when you consider that a few other columnists could easily be mistaken for PR agents for the major political parties and that two others might well be the ideologues behind the important thrones.
Where does that leave your independent Maltese columnist, that strange creature who still shows a interest in politics while not actually being involved – directly or indirectly – with any political party?
Perhaps Saviour Balzan’s much-publicised threat to board the catamaran to Sicily on election day in order to substitute his right to vote with a good plate of cozze sums up the independent columnist’s predicament rather well.
That theatrical gesture betrays, I think, a sea-food platter of frustration and bitterness which I have observed in people who still care enough about Maltese politics to stick their necks out but find themselves fundamentally rejecting the current rules of the game.
The independent Maltese columnist is, ultimately, a lonely figure. His arguments – largely drowned out by the triumphant orchestras of the Rainbow Parties – often sound like the rants of the desperate narrator in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. And I suspect that, just like the character in the novel, he often asks himself why he doesn’t just go with the flow.

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