Stumbling blocks?

A free press is not a privilege but a necessity in any civilised society worthy of its name. Politicians who complain about the press are akin to sailors who complain about the sea. They should seriously consider switching to other, less turbulent, endeavours such as gardening.

Some of the foremost exponents of the Malta Labour Party have been systematically trying to put pressure on contributors to the local independent media to the point of stooping to the level of foul-mouthed harridans. They do this because they look upon free-thinking journalists as stumbling blocks to their single-minded quest for power.

Joe Mifsud, the Labour Party's international secretary, recently had the audacity to phone Noel Grima, the editor of The Malta Independent On Sunday, to berate him about an article about Alfred Sant, which was to appear on the issue of the following day.

Angry phone calls from paranoid party officials to journalists are associated with Soviet-style politics and are hardly expected from a high-ranking official of a party aspiring to govern a democratic European country. Dr Mifsud is a lawyer and should surely know better. He should also have had better foresight.

A similar incident involving Saviour Balzan, the editor of Malta Today, was accompanied by an attempt at blackmail. Mr Balzan was warned that if he went ahead and published the results of a poll his paper had commissioned that showed that the PN was two points ahead of the MLP, Labour would go public with allegations about one of the directors of the publishing house of his paper. The allegations were unfounded, which makes the threat even more despicable.

Manwel Cuschieri is the standard bearer of the MLP and is given the opportunity to spew his sentiments forth daily on Super One Radio. Mr Cuschieri regularly indulges in hysterical attacks on the English language press. He savaged The Times recently, for instance, simply for not having published a Labour Party press release verbatim. MLP general secretary Jason Micallef himself also attacked The Sunday Times on the same day on BondiPlus for what he alleged to be the insensitive reporting of Dr Sant's illness. But the pinnacle of vulgarity was reached when, on the same programme, he "exposed" a female columnist for, according to him, having carried out cosmetic surgery.

Thankfully, these people are not running the place up to now, so the pressure they can exert is limited to threats and insults. The MLP deputy leader, Michael Falzon, is known to have made an appeal to Labour supporters to strive to take the country back to the glorious years of the 1970s and 1980s. The relationship of the MLP with the press in those days is exemplified by the complete destruction of The Times offices by a Labourite mob who practically razed it to the ground.

Today's Labour Party officials were either already politically active in those "glorious" years or owe their political formation to them. Good to keep in mind.