The government will issue a White Paper with proposed media reform laws, Prime Minister Robert Abela said on Monday. 

The declaration came as he tabled the final report of the committee of media experts he had appointed last year to advise on how to reform the media laws. 

By accepting to publish a White Paper, the government upheld requests by the Institute of Maltese Journalists as well as a number of journalists, editors, academics and media organisations. 

The report was concluded and handed to Prime Minister Robert Abela in July, but it was only tabled in parliament on Monday.

It was drawn by an eight-person committee appointed by the government last year to assess local laws and advise on how they could be improved. That process was one of the recommendations made by a public inquiry into the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed in 2017.

The government received feedback from the committee one year ago. But instead of making the committee’s report public, it unveiled three bills which it said were based on the committee’s feedback.

An outcry ensued, with journalists and editors noting that they had not been given any opportunity to provide their input.

Having initially defended the process, the prime minister eventually agreed to freeze the bills, to allow consultation with the broader media sector.

What the committee is proposing

Among the proposed changes included in the report tabled on Monday is the inclusion of journalism in the enforceable part of the constitution, which can only be changed with a two-thirds majority vote in parliament.   

Other proposals made by the committee focus on creating a system of transparent public funding for media houses, binding public authorities to provide information to journalists within a reasonable time and constitutionally protecting journalists from revealing their sources. 

The committee also proposed a completely remastered law protecting journalists from Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, allowing them to be dismissed early on in the court proceedings and recommending the removal of restrictive terms such as journalist, author or editor, thereby extending the protection from SLAPPs to other possible targets, including NGOs and activists.

It also advised the government to empower magistrates who rule against a SLAPP case to order the payment of damages to the target of the case.

The committee revised the government’s bill to provide fuller protection to journalists and their sources, reinstating a right to freedom from interference on correspondence that had been removed from the government's planned law.

It stressed that the protection of journalists' sources, including information that can identify a source, must be guaranteed in the Constitution. This, according to the committee, will give a clear signal of the importance of this amendment. It said the constitution should explicitly protect "the right for free media".

In its report, the committee also noted that the government had ignored its original proposal imposing a clear obligation for authorities to provide access to information within a reasonable time. It repeated this recommendation, saying public authorities must be bound by the constitution to be transparent with information and provide it to journalists within a reasonable time.

The committee suggested introducing a mechanism to provide public funding for media houses through, among others, direct grants, tax incentives and investment in human and technological resources.

It also called on the government to create a transparent system how to distribute its advertising budget across Maltese media and suggested that the government should lobby at a European level to introduce a law that obliges platforms such as Google and Meta to pay for content uploaded on their platforms. A similar law was introduced in Canada and Australia.

Turning to the state broadcaster, the committee recommended the appointment of an ad hoc committee to analyse the current situation and propose reforms to ensure that public broadcasting is strengthened with the aim of being truly objective, independent and impartial.

Meanwhile, the Nationalist Party on Monday called on the government to withdraw the bills that have been frozen in parliament for a year and start the process afresh.