Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/563633
maltatoday, SUNDAY, 30 AUGUST 2015 24 I t happens to the best of us, I suppose. And (let's face it) 'Il-Mument' is not exactly the best newspaper this world has ever seen. All the same, I hesitate to make too much of the PN weekly's hilarious mix-up between North and South Korea this week. You can probably guess why, too. It is invariably risky for anyone in the newspaper business to highlight mistakes made by other newspapers... no matter how astonishing these mistakes may be. The truth is we all have our off-days in this line of work; and we all get even the most basic, elementary facts wrong from time to time. I, for instance, once wrote an entire article about arguably the most famous street artist in the world… and spelt his name incorrectly throughout. Not because of some glitch that had crept into the piece at proofing stage, I hasten to add. No sub- editors to pin the blame on, either. No, indeed: the truth is even more embarrassing than that. All along, I actually thought that the correct spelling of his name was 'Bansky', as opposed to 'Banksy'. That's how I had initially read the name when I first saw it in print; and that's how it came to get stuck in my head from that point on. The only explanation I can think up offhand is that the incorrect version sounded more authentic to my ears than the real thing. 'Banski' chimes in nicely with an Eastern European nomenclature tradition that also gave us 'Roman Polanski', etc. It just sounded right at the time. Don't 'ansk-me' why… And it came as an earth- shattering surprise to discover that I was wrong, too. Even now, I hesitate to utter that artist's name aloud… lest I mispronounce it in the same way as I had misspelt it in the article. Then there are all the mistakes that I might have made, but was spared only by coincidence or good fortune. To give but one example before moving on: for years – throughout my childhood, in fact – I was utterly convinced that the English language contained a verb called 'TO MISLE' (pronounced: 'my- zel'), which meant 'to deceive'. It never struck me as odd that I had only ever seen this verb in writing; and even then, that it only seemed to ever exist in the past tense. So for years and years on end, in my mind I pronounced the word 'MISLED' – i.e., the past tense of 'to mislead' – as… 'myzelled'. And I still remember that incredible moment of realisation when the correct pronunciation first dawned on me. It was a classic Homer Simpson 'D'oh!' moment, when the sheer force of decades of incredible stupidity suddenly smacks you full in the face. And while I had 'myzelled' myself into that mistake… it proved difficult to 'myzel' myself out of it. Eventually I had to drum it into my consciousness through sheer dint of repetition: "Mis-led, mis-led, mis-LED", etc… Only now, all these years later, do I feel fully confident when using that word in conversation... So before turning our attention to what is undeniably Il- Mument's finest hour: a word of self-critical caution. It could very easily have been me… or anyone else in the newspaper business, for that matter. But of course, it wasn't me or anyone else. It was 'Il-Mument': a politically owned newspaper with a very conspicuous political bias. And this adds a whole new dimension to what might otherwise be laughed off as a bizarre editing mishap, of the kind that might one day happen to all of us. It is one thing to genuinely mix up North and South Korea out of sheer geo-political ignorance… but it is something else entirely to mix those two countries up deliberately, because it serves some kind of political purpose to mislead (ahem) your readers. Let's take a close look at this cock-up, shall we? The front- page 'exclusive' report, entitled 'Labour and Muscat's government off to North Korea', claimed that Transport Minister Joe Mizzi would represent the government of Malta on the occasion of that country's 67th anniversary celebrations. It also claimed that Alex Sceberras Trigona, former foreign minister and current special envoy to the World Trade Organisation, would accompany the minister on this official visit. "This visit was kept completely secret and will come as a shock to everyone, as North Korea is a country in which dictatorship and repression are the order of the day," Il-Mument went on. "Other democratic countries don't have Opinion Raphael Vassallo A tale of two Koreas… Is there more to this – admittedly amusing – newspaper gaffe than meets the eye?