The age of political media is over

And it’s only a matter of time before the age of politics, as we know it, will likewise be dead and buried. But let’s stick with the media for now. That empire will after all crumble first… and like a pit-canary, its demise will make the death of Maltese politics inevitable.

Some of you may have read a court report this week, in which PN-owned newspaper In-Nazzjon was found guilty of libelling Keith Schembri (the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, and also executive director of Kasko Ltd) over a 2014 story that turned out to be a total fabrication. 

The story focused on Keith Schembri’s cousin – Ryan Schembri – who fled the country after the collapse of ‘More Supermarket’, leaving a trail of unrecoverable debt in his wake. The actual debts accrued by this failed enterprise amounted to around €40 million, all owed to different creditors. (It is a significant figure, incidentally, as it represents roughly double the amount of debt owed by the Nationalist Party to an equally diverse string of creditors… including, at the time of the article, Keith Schembri’s Kasko itself.)

In any case: it transpired during court proceedings that Keith Schembri’s actual involvement in his cousin’s failed business was non-existent. Naturally, this did not stop Nazzjon journalist Joe Mikallef (yes, that’s how he spells his name) from spinning the yarn that the two cousins were somehow in cahoots. As ‘evidence’, Mikallef pointed to the fact that a) they were blood relations; and b) Ryan Schembri was believed to have opened a new supermarket in Tripoli, Libya… where, lo and behold! Kasko, Keith Schembri’s venture, also did business at the time.

What more proof do you need? None, Mikallef very evidently thought. He certainly didn’t supply a jot of further evidence in his article. On the contrary, he even claimed – again, without any substantiation whatsoever – that Ryan had kept in mobile phone contact with Keith after absconding: an allegation that Keith Schembri vehemently denied.

The implications of the second fabrication are particularly insidious. Ryan Schembri was a wanted man at the time; had it been true that his cousin Keith was aware of his whereabouts, it would have created an obligation – legal or moral, it doesn’t actually matter at this stage – to inform the police of what he knew. 

The headline of that Nazzjon article itself actually leads with that very supposition: ‘Someone knows where he is’… leaving the reader in no doubt whatsoever as to the identity of that mysterious ‘someone’.

Right: at this point, a few small questions must be asked concerning the chain of command at a newspaper like In-Nazzjon. How did then editor Nathaniel Attard justify his choice to run a purely speculative, non-factual smattering of insinuations as a front-page story? Did he have a chat with the journalist, and ask him to furnish more evidence before considering the story for publication? Did he insist that Mikallef should at least try and elicit a comment from Keith Schembri (Ryan being unavailable for comment at the time)? 

To put it simply: did the editor of that newspaper run even the most basic, entry-level checks and cross-checks that would be considered ‘de rigueur’ in any serious journalistic institution, anywhere in the world? And if not: by what right does he call himself an editor in the first place?

Well, you all already know the answer… but it makes a nice change to see it spelt out in black on white (by someone other than me). This time it fell to the presiding magistrate, Dr Francesco Depasquale, to place his finger squarely on the root of the problem: “This type of journalism causes much more harm than good to journalism and to the respect which the media deserve, since the article is not based on truth and on facts but on the author’s intention to harm Keith Schembri, who is deemed to be the political adversary of the Nationalist Party and to harm the government of the day.”

Yes, folks, it really is as simple as that. The entire existence of the Nationalist Party-owned media has nothing to do with the profession we otherwise call ‘journalism’ – a profession that is rooted in the disclosure of facts, in as far as these are possible to verify. It exists simply to damage the PN’s political adversaries… as a rule, through lies and deceit. 

That’s not journalism. It doesn’t even remotely resemble journalism, either. That is a Mafia-style hit-job, nothing more, nothing less. In the hands of political parties, ‘the media’ has become a weapon of mass destruction.

And OK: given all we now know about Keith Schembri’s other business venture, it may be a little difficult to feel genuinely sorry for the libelled victim. But that is beside the point really. On any other occasion, it could just as easily have been me, you or the guy who comes round selling doughnuts every other day. Because this is not about Kasko or Panamagate. This is about an absurd, surreal and utterly bizarre situation, whereby it has become ‘acceptable’ to simply defecate on all the principles of journalism, for no other reason than to score political points. And while, in this case, the offender was In-Nazzjon… in other cases it is likely to be a blog, or a thread on Facebook, or any of dozens of ‘new media’ platforms that lie entirely outside any context of structured journalism.

In fact, I see no reason to limit this criticism only to In-Nazzjon. Kullhadd (which is owned by Labour); l-orizzont and it-Torca (both owned by the General Workers’ Union) and above all the two political party stations, are all equally immersed in the same paradigm.

The recent furore over Mario Vella’s offensive comment is a classic case in point. We’ve all already seen how pressure exerted by both ONE News and Glenn Bedingfield’s blog resulted in a material impact on Vella himself, who was dropped from the Farsons Beer Festival as a result. And sure, some of you may have felt Vella deserved what he got.

What many may not have noticed, however, is that One News has already moved beyond the original offensive comment, and is now incorporating Vella’s face as a visual cue to trigger off an instinctive reaction of political hatred and revulsion among its viewers. In recent bulletins, references to Mario Vella were accompanied by footage showing Vella at (among other things) protests organised by the ‘Front Inharsu l-ODZ’. You don’t need a PhD in media studies to understand the political thrust of this ploy. Vella is an instant receptacle for Labour hatred… and Front Kontra ODZ is perceived as a threat to the Muscat administration, because it exposes the government’s disgusting hypocrisy on the environment. 

So, just like In-Nazzjon exploited Keith Schembri’s family connections, the Labour-owned TV station exploits the ill-feeling towards Vella, to engender equally virulent groundswell hatred towards an (unrelated) environmentalist lobby.

It’s an old trick, too; and again, by no means restricted to Labour. Perhaps the most criminally reprehensible use of this tactic was when NET TV targeted author Alex Vella Gera during the ‘Realta’ censorship issue a few years back. NET News associated Vella Gera with paedophilia, peddling the unbelievable lie that his story ‘glorified sex with children’. 

To this day, I am not sure what shocks me more: that a political party which once championed ‘democracy’ and ‘fundamental liberties’ would stoop so low; or that an entire country would seem to acquiesce to this sordid state of affairs, on the basis that… ‘it’s politics’.

Sorry, but no. Politics cannot justify this sort of malignity and dishonesty. And while the two parties may have gotten away with it all these years, it is now evident that this wholesale orgy of trash journalism is about to come to a shuddering halt.

There are three factors which make the current situation unsustainable. The first is simply money. It is an open secret that both parties are struggling to finance their ill-gotten media empires. Just imagine how much harder they will both struggle, when their market shares continue to tumble at the present rate.

I won’t go into detail regarding the regular BA reports showing both NET and One TV sharing an ever-dwindling slice of the viewership pie (a slice which becomes even thinner and measlier, when you look at paper sales of titles like Nazzjon and Kullhadd.) What these surveys all indicate, however, is that both parties’ media (the PN in particular, given its financial situation) need to radically revise their approach to journalism if they are to increase their readership/viewership. 

Yet they are doing the opposite: entrenching themselves ever deeper in a FAILED formula which can only continue to undermine their own credibility.

Meanwhile, the more desperate they get, the more targets they indiscriminately lash out at… inevitably moving beyond the ‘legitimate’ hit list of politicians and public figures, and turning their guns onto ordinary nobodies instead. Anyone who says anything that pisses off Glenn Bedingfield or Daphne Caruana Galizia, for instance; anyone whose Facebook status update might be construed as a criticism of government or opposition.

Take those three factors together – the financial unsustainability, the resistance to reform, and the fact that both parties are now declaring war on their own potential readers/viewers, with no end in sight… and the collapse of the system becomes both inevitable and desirable.

So by all means carry on, the pair of you. You will only hasten your own destruction; and as far as I am concerned, the sooner you both fall, the better.