Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/248536
20 Opinion maltatoday, SUNDAY, 26 JANUARY 2014 I read the news today, oh boy A nd it wasn't about a lucky man who made the grade. In fact, it wasn't about very much at all. I suspect it would have been more interesting to work out how many holes it really would take to fill the Albert Hall. I can say this with absolute certainty, because part of what was reported in the news this week (on One TV, at any rate) was… me. That's right, folks: little me. And I am reminded of a famous quote by, I think, WC Fields: "Every day I read the obituary column in the newspaper, and if my name isn't on it… I go to work." Let's face it: you know the One News desk must be having an uninteresting week, if they found nothing better to run a news item about than one of my articles. I've worked in a few newsrooms in my time, and I've seen it happen before. Slow news week, deadline looming, and suddenly you're on air in 25 minutes with nothing to run… and a panicky shout comes from the head of news. Does anyone have anything – anything at all – we can possibly use to fill up two minutes? Well, there was this article in today's newspaper… Great, that'll do perfectly. Write up the story, you've got 10 minutes… And hey presto! 'The News' is made. Of course, in this case I suppose it helps that the article was heavily critical of the Opposition, and that the station reporting it is owned and operated by the party in government. And I suppose it helps a little more when it is arguably the only thing that can seem to find – anywhere in the whole world, by the looks of things – that isn't a veritable fusillade of criticism aimed at their precious 'golden passport' scheme. But there were two problems with their choice of news items that day. One: it is not 'news', by definition, when an opinion columnist writes an opinion column… any more than it is 'news' when a car park attendant attends a car park, or when a prison guard guards a prison (oh wait, that might be news… still, you know what I mean). Two: they can't have read the article very closely; otherwise they might have noticed a teenie-weenie little irony in the very fact that they even chose to run it as a report. The example I wrote about may have concerned a Net News item, this much is true; but the core argument was actually about the very concept of politicallyowned stations and how they are slowly strangling the life out of the entire country. I would have thought it was obvious that this argument applies as much to One News as to Net. But in case they missed the point, it was ably illustrated by precisely the same 'journalist-writes-article' report last Wednesday. OK, seeing as that article of mine seems to be regarded as 'news' in a remote corner of Marsa, I might as well recap. The fundamental point was that our country has been hijacked… not Raphael Vassallo Is it in the national interest of a tourism destination to make foreigners feel threatened at the airport? YOUR FIRST CLICK OF THE DAY www.maltatoday.com.mt by one of the two parties, but by both of them in concert. And they have done this in a number of ways… not least, by dedicating their time in Opposition to actively sabotaging government initiatives, heedless of any collateral damage among the civilian population, or indeed anything but their own shortterm interests. Another way they do this is by projecting their own self-centred concerns onto the nation, and convincing us (successfully, I have to admit) that their own private interests and our collective interests are one and the same thing… when in fact they are not, have never been and never will be. I singled out one news item on Net TV last Monday because it was a particularly odious example of how this ugly system actually works in practice. The story was about a Chinese man who went to Malta… and in a pleasant break with tradition, this time there was nothing about having a "fock on the table" or a "sh*t on the bed", either. I imagine I can't have been the only one to find the ensuing proceedings at MIA rather childish. Others must have pointed it out too, because the station afterwards felt compelled to justify its actions: which, for the record, involved ambushing a rich foreigner because they suspected he might be… well… rich and foreign. And out came trotting the same old cliché I seem to remember being a favourite among officials of the Mintoff administration back in the 1980s: it was "in the national interest" to report the story. Yes, well, this is exactly the point I was trying to make with that article. If you're running a news station on behalf of a political party that has a vested interest in distorting perceptions one way or another… you are obviously going to interpret your own interests as being indistinguishable from those of the entire country. So if the PN has a vested interest in sabotaging a citizenship-byinvestment scheme, because – oh, who knows? They think it might actually reduce the deficit, and thus fulfil a promise their own government had made around 17 times in the last 10 years – they will do anything in their power to derail it, regardless how people are trampled upon in the process. So if a rich Chinese man makes the naive mistake of walking into the cross-hairs, then… that's it. Rich Chinese men are now the enemy, folks. Fire at will. There are of course other issues to be considered. Is it in the national interest of a tourism destination to make foreigners feel threatened at the airport? Or, for that matter, to routinely insult the largest population on the planet, by simply assuming that a very rich Chinese national must obviously be doing something crooked and arcane? And is it in the country's interest for anybody's arrival details to be leaked to an organisation that has taken a sudden dislike to non-Maltese nationals? The list goes on and on, but it is evident from the press release issued Thursday that Net TV didn't pause to consider any of this at all (except perhaps the part about trying to sabotage the IIP scheme). Easy to see why, too. All that lies outside the direct political interest of the Nationalist Party; and only that which interests the PN can possibly interest the rest of the country, etc. In any case: the story itself is not as important as what it tells us about our own perceptions of the news. Because it wasn't just the Net TV station manager who came out in its defence: comments boards all over the web whirred with online altercations over this very issue. One of the more amusing defences I heard was what this type of report constitutes "investigative journalism". Sadly for that claim, the first line of the article itself was: "A nameless Chinese individual…" Nameless, huh? Well, next time I need a detective who can solve mysteries without even finding out the most basic, entry-level information required for the task… I'll call the Stamperija. Again, however, the interesting part concerns how others outside any political party always feel compelled to take up arms in defence of 'their' party's concerns, and in most cases to repeat the carefully-crafted mantras provided for them by the self-same medium they defend. You can see the machinery of the entire operation at work. People really do assume that 'their' party's interests are automatically also the country's interests, just as they have always been told to think. And they very often defend those interests with precisely the sort of jingoist fervour you'd normally associate with extreme nationalism. Which brings me back to the One News item about yours truly. I suppose I ought to be flattered