This blame game on the media is going nowhere

Inside the counting hall - Lawrence Zammit on the left, Michael Briguglio and Arnold Cassola of AD, and Arthur Galea Salomone on the right.

I chipped in a few thoughts on Radju Malta’s Ghandi Xi Nghid this morning at the end of a week that was dominated by the post-referendum comment on the media – a media that revealed itself to be generally ‘liberal’ (as far as the choice for divorce or church-state separation goes). To put it mildly, the Maltese media was ferocious when it came to its line of questioning with both sides of the divorce debate, and it was ready to take on demigods (gran’ alla has a sweeter ring) and expose the inconsistencies and contradictions that were emanating, mainly, from within the Maltese Catholic archdiocese. It so happened that the media was also the theme of the week for the three religious programmes produced by the Missionary Society of St Paul – whose indelible mark on Maltese society makes world news every year or so – on TV. Joyce Cassar, a no movement figurehead, is the presenter of one of them, Sejjahtli.

It wasn’t just because journalists are ‘liberal’. There are many conservative journalists around, and divorce is not something for liberals only. Church-State separation is crucial to the advancement of modern conservative policy as well. Certainly, the fact that this wasn’t a general election allowed newspapers to take distinct editorial lines. Freed from the pressure of political retribution – a retribution that is delegated to advertising firms and businesses that provide private, independent media with a revenue lifeline – the media felt it could freely take an editorial stand in favour of divorce.

But I sensed that the media was in general informed by a sense of history in the divorce debate (the injustice of the 1960s interdiction is unarguably a blemish on our society). This was not about divorce itself but about Church-State separation, the way religious belief had crept into politics not by way of a ‘humanist inspiration’ but as a fetish and the basis of prejudice towards people who live different lives and who share different beliefs. The media that believes in the free marketplace of ideas, was right to take a clear editorial stand on divorce.

I disagreed with a comment from PBS journalist Sergio Mallia that the media conducted a crusade against the Church (unless he meant it was a crusade against the Church’s own crusade). Without wanting to sound uncouth, Sergio comes from a government-funded newsroom which adheres to a policy of equidistance when it comes to politics and religion. The private, independent media has no sacred cows and as much as possible, it gauges the public interest not by balancing out the powers that be but by serving as an interlocutor for the public.

The PN media, conducting the anti-divorce and pro-Church campaign on the Prime Minister’s behalf, took umbrage at the independent media for challenging Church doctrine on the basis that Catholicism happens to be the official, constitutionally-recognised religion of the island. I was surprised and annoyed that the media-savvy PN would risk burn bridges with the independent media which has generally supported it in the past 30 years.

When the Church decided to enter the arena and deploy its forces against divorce, it automatically opened itself up to criticism, satire, questioning, and all sort of intrusive prodding and poking by the media and the general public. And this wasn’t about a simple theological debate on why divorce was wrong as laid down in the Gospels. This was about the active role the Catholic Church took in the debate to consolidate its social control on marriage. So we saw church media luminary Fr Joe Borg and Cana movement president Anna Vella join forces with Misco pollster Lawrence Zammit and PBS chief executive Anton Attard (and electoral manager for the Prime Minister in 2008) to prop up Stock Exchange chairman Arthur Galea Salomone and MFSA deputy chairman Andre Camilleri for the debate.

But while the secular-lite proxies of the Church advanced arguments against changing the marriage laws, the Church’s leaders were conducting their own campaign. First the Archbishop said the Church would not conduct a crusade – but his authority could not withstand the zealousness of his foot-soldiers in the parishes; then the Church’s chief theologians published a note telling worshippers that even if they conscientiously arrived at the “wrong” decision to vote for divorce they would not be committing a sin; and finally Gozo bishop Mario Grech, occupied in a foreign land against assorted barbarians of ‘ateiiizmu, sekulariiiiezmu, u laaaajciezmu’ declared that conscience was not dictated by theologians.

Fair game – nobody expected the Church to say any different; nobody expected the media to be any different either, especially MaltaToday with its editorial line since 1999 against the discrimination inherent in our marriage laws.

I also felt Dr Bernard Grech, who spoke of media spin on Radju Malta, was simplistic in his analysis. Particular mention was made of my report on his press conference being ‘spun’. Yes, my report was not a cut-and-paste of what Kevin Papagiorcopulo, the Church PRO on loan to the no movement, gave me because I engaged with Dr Grech in a question-and-answer session. When he said children of separated couples live with the hope of their parents reuniting all their life, this happened to be the rhetorical smokescreen to the main argument in his press conference: that divorce could allow remarried spouses to take their ex-spouse to court, and challenge custodial restrictions on their children not to be exposed to their new spouse.

Wily Grech slipped in that custodial restrictions protect children from being exposed even to same-sex partners of the parent - of course, in the event of divorce this is impossible since marriage in Malta is only for heterosexual couples. And I felt right in asking him, as The Times and The Independent did in the same press conference, whether he expected children to live with hope rather than find themselves in a proper family again. Or when I asked him what his ‘experience’ (the intellectual crutch for the no movement) was of reunited families: nine couples in 16 years of his legal career. Hardly empirical evidence supporting his argument.

Blaming the media is a lost cause. We’re mediating for our readers and asking the questions they want asked. We sensed the popular feeling that the no movement, inebriated by their religious zeal, did not want to acknowledge. They don’t like the referendum result because they don’t like the way popular democracy works. But that’s not our fault. Maybe they should have a word with Kate, if they don’t already have the prime minister’s attention.