‘Maltese media needs minority voices’ – Carmen Sammut

The Maltese media landscape is pluralistic in its approach to migration, but it needs to become less polarised and more inclusive of migrant perspectives, media analyst Carmen Sammut said yesterday. 

Sammut was speaking at the ‘Humanities on Migration’ conference organised by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malta, which aimed to present a perspective on migration that moves away from typical – and usually political or economic – discussions of the phenomenon. 

During her talk, entitled ‘Immigration News in Receiving Countries: The Case of Malta’, Sammut – a lecturer at the International Relations department of the University of Malta – argued that the Maltese media landscape does present a varied ideological perspective. However when it comes to migration, media outlets tend to comment on migration without providing space for migrants to voice their own concerns, in their own words. 

“Sometimes we get to hear from Malta’s Imam – it helps that he speaks fluent Maltese – but when it comes to ethnic diversity in Maltese media, it tends to stop there,” Sammut said, citing the “short-lived experiment” of the 2013-14 publication Side by Side as an example of how this deficit can be tackled.

A 12-month EU-funded project by SOS Malta, Side by Side allowed foreigners living in Malta to speak directly about their experience – precisely the kind of perspective that the mainstream media model in Malta lacks, according to Sammut. 

Sammut said that generally speaking, media outlets can serve as “agenda-setters, especially when politicians do not take a clear stance on any given issue”, noting that migration is a case in point. “It was only during the 2008 elections that politicians stopped walking on eggshells when it came to migration, and to some extent they still do.” Sammut contends that this lacuna in political discourse allows the media to underline public discourse more prominently.     

Basing her research on interviews conducted with journalists from various Maltese media organisations during the 2006-08 period, Sammut also identified a clear rift between English language newspapers and their Maltese-language counterparts. 

“English-language media tend to take the ‘human rights position’ on migration, while Maltese newspapers tend to over-emphasise its economic and security-related aspects,” Sammut said. However, she also noted some key – and telling – developments within individual organsations on this issue. 

For example, the General Workers’ Union print organ l-orizzont shifted towards a more tolerant attitude in recent years, according to Sammut: from running alarmist stories about migrant prostitutes introducing diseases to the country and migrants smuggling homemade weapons into the country, Sammut noted how the publication has since shown itself to be supportive of migrant workers’ rights. 

She also came across individual examples that belied the apparently monolithic structures of local media institutions. One journalist employed with a political newspaper told Sammut that he was discouraged from espousing his racist views in print, since this would “compromise the paper’s political message”.

Another journalist who had footage of AFM soldiers beating migrants at an open centre fought to get the story published despite conflicting editorial interests. However, the journalist confessed to Sammut that while he had no problem passing the footage on to Amnesty International, he stopped short of selling it to an Italian news organisation, fearing the impact it would have on Malta’s reputation abroad. 

Another interviewee said they were sympathetic to migration, but were also mindful of the fact that the readership may not be in line with their stance, warning that news outlets will lose their viability if they don’t respond to public anxieties for a sustained period of time. However, Sammut pointed out that by playing to populist fears, the media can give way to “moral panics”, as she sees happening right now in relation to the ISIS threat.