Another article about corruption? Oh no, how negative. Let’s talk instead about popes and gracious visits. And how the politicos who matter wished to see him come here and gloss over our little misdeeds.
Let’s be positive and join the chorus of voters who view the world through specially tinted specs.
We, the people, are ultra-positive. If there is a mere whiff of corruption, we seek it out. We chase it. Like the biblical prodigal son returning home we embrace it as one of our own. We get hold of it and we celebrate it as part of us.
When the pope came and denounced corruption, TVM, our own disher out of truth, our Pravda, avoided any mention of his reference to corruption. They very nicely incised it out.
Repubblika, journalist Jacob Borg and the Times of Malta editorialists considered it unworthy of the national TV station to censor the pope. Conduct unbecoming, they seemed to imply.
This ħasla papali (a right royal telling off to use a lovely clichéd way of describing the speech) was what our local media and Maltese people should all have praised. Who could ever, in their right senses, say they are against the eradication of corruption?
But TVM had a divine intuition. They figured they would outplay and outclass the pontiff.
By failing to report what the pope said they admitted to the world, or at least to the thinking world, that we are a corrupt country. In fact, so corrupt that we need to censor the words of a visiting pontiff.
If the people at TVM and their stablemates, Torċa, ONE news and KullĦadd, had an iota of grey matter they would have reported the pope’s words a few dozen times. That would show we do not have anything to hide, to cover up, to shield from our local viewers and readers.
By censoring the piece about corruption, we saw the cap, donned it and wow it fitted beautifully. We are corrupt: the pope said it and we proved it totally.
Wasn’t it the disgraced prime minister, Joseph Muscat, who said that if you do not fight corruption, you are corrupt yourself?
TVM now acts as a shield against all who dare criticise the ruling party- Victor Calleja
Let’s not forget that this man left in very shady circumstances. His followers still do not view him as a spent force or a relic of disgrace.
His promise to fight corruption ended up being a right royal cock-up when he himself had to resign because of the corrupt goings-on under his premiership.
The prime minister of today, Robert Abela, has often said that his is the rule of continuity, that he will continue where his predecessor left off.
The fact that Abela, to my knowledge, has never once alluded to what the pope said about corruption, proves beyond doubt that Abela is a continuation of, an extension, of Muscat.
More proof, not that much proof was ever needed, of this continuity is that Abela has never condemned the state broadcaster either. As the Times of Malta editorial rightly pointed out, the nefarious ways of Abela in broadcasting are clear when you see who he has appointed as minister responsible for that field: Owen Bonnici himself. A man who was condemned by the courts for breaching the human rights of protestors. Without realising, the powers that be in Malta are admitting that corruption is endemic, part of us and embedded deep within our core.
Corruption is institutionalised so irrevocably that we are not allowed to hear a whisper against this societal horror of ours. TVM now acts as a shield against all who dare criticise the ruling party.
TVM, ironically, is now reinforcing the belief that the Labour Party is allied with corruption.
vc@victorcalleja.com