Almost seven years after Daphne Caruana Galizia’s brutal assassination and a whole litany of platitudes on media protection, the chilling truth is that journalists continue to be ridiculed and attacked.
Whether ‘enemies of the people’ or ‘part of the establishment’, inquisitive journalists from the independent media remain in the cross hairs of those with a lot to lose when the truth is unearthed.
The venom, hate and incitement that culminated in Caruana Galizia’s murder persist to this very day, including from people part, or very close, to the government.
The recommendations made by the three judges who conducted the public inquiry into Caruana Galizia’s death are still on paper. As also are the proposals made by the committee of experts tasked with advising the government on implementing those recommendations.
Independent journalism has a vital role to play in a democracy and, as the European Court of Human Rights asserts, the State has the obligation to act positively to create effective systems that safeguard journalists adequately and promote free journalism.
A recent magistrates’ court judgment reminded us that a former minister’s aide had no qualms resorting to legal action – since abolished – to seek revenge against Caruana Galizia. Such “unprecedented [action] in Maltese legal history”, Magistrate Marse-Ann Farrugia ruled, was meant to have “a chilling effect” not only on Caruana Galizia but on all journalists.
And the Employment Commission made it amply clear Labour in government stops at nothing to silence journalists breathing down its neck. It found political discrimination in Norman Vella’s transfer from the state broadcaster to the airport immigration unit in 2013, stressing this was “not justifiable in a truly democratic society”.
When faced with such painful truth, Robert Abela usually seeks solace in insisting that all happened before his time – his time as prime minister, of course, because he was still an integral part of the government. Either that or else he hits out at the ‘establishment’, which he accuses of being dead set to cause as much damage to him and his government as possible.
It seems this ‘establishment’ is growing and becoming more vociferous. And Abela can only blame himself for that because the real ‘establishment’, the administration he is supposed to be heading, having the national good as its main mission, has failed to effectively ensure the promotion and safeguarding of the fundamental right to freedom of expression and democracy.
Abela seems to prefer ‘the people’s court’ and a main pillar of democracy – the courts of law – end up in his line of fire.
As does independent journalism, which he evidently is uncomfortable in declaring the fourth pillar of democracy and granting it constitutional protection.
Abela keeps attacking free journalists and some media organisations, saying they are part of the ‘establishment’.
He fails to publicly rebuke Jason Micallef, a former head of the Labour Party’s media organisation and now chair of the Valletta Cultural Agency, who went to the extreme of publishing photographs of chat conversations on a journalist’s laptop taken surreptitiously during Joseph Muscat’s press conference.
Micallef had no shame in brandishing these chats because he knows he can get away with it and knows he will get to keep his plum government job.
This latest incident rightly led the Institute of Maltese Journalists to wonder whether journalists need to watch their back while doing their duty and warned that instigating hate against journalists was a very slippery slope.
We are once again seeing signs of antagonism against journalists. And we all know what that climate of antagonism led to in October 2017.