The best joke going around Nato these days – and let’s take the opportunity to laugh about the situation, while we can – is: “We used to believe Russia had the second best army in the world: now we know it is only the second best army in Ukraine.”

One of the biggest problems, and I appreciate that there are many, is that we don’t know whether Vladimir Putin knows how badly his generals have been doing. For sure, they are not going to tell him.

But nor are his newspapers. Russian journalists do not report bad news about Russia. Putin is the state; the state is communist. And so are the reporters.

I have written here that when Mikhail Gorbachev was in charge I went to Moscow to try to introduce his reporters and editors to the idea of a free press. He introduced Glasnost, the policy of making government more open and democratic. And I have related how the journalists didn’t want it. They did not want the freedom to criticise a communist regime because they were communists themselves.

What has this got to do with Malta? Simply that Malta is going the same way.

We have a diverse press in this country, which is a good thing. But half of it is not a free press but a party press. (I include the TV stations with the ‘press’ corps.)

And, disturbingly, the majority of Maltese journalists like it that way: they are in favour of political ownership (and, therefore, control) of communication. In other words, the dissemination of news in this country is only half-free. We have scores of reporters who write what they are told and, in any case, would not write anything that reflected badly on their party.

What sort of journalists are these? Did they enter the trade wishing to inform their fellow man about national or world events? Or with the ambition of becoming a party mouthpiece?

Any half-decent scribe can follow his newspaper’s policy and even toe the party line in his writing. But if he wants to be called a reporter, he nevertheless understands the need to write a balanced report and his boss, if he is a newspaperman, understands the point of publishing it.

We have scores of reporters who would not write anything that reflected badly on their party- Revel Barker

That’s not the way it works here, though. As in Moscow, the reporters will not write – and their editors would not publish – anything that might show the party in a bad light… because they are party supporters. They are not, any of them, journalists: they are party PROs.

Lord Northcliffe (1865-1922), who invented the (left-leaning) Daily Mirror and the (right-of-centre) Daily Mail, once said: “News is what someone, somewhere, wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.”

Self-styled reporters should read that and stop, and think: they are not in journalism but in advertising.

If you don’t tell the whole truth, you are telling a lie. If you see your role in life as kowtowing to political masters, or rewriting party hand-outs, get out of journalism and into politics. Write the handouts yourself. Call yourself a journalist? Nope: you are a party hack.

Happily, the other half of Maltese journalism can truly call itself independent. It can say what it likes about both (or all) parties: praising the government – and the opposition – when it does something right and criticising its mistakes, and effectively acting as the opposition when the second party (as is the current case) is largely incompetent.

Even then, the government can influence the independents. Newspapers rely for their income on advertising and the government spends a lot on advertising. It can feed more of it, and, therefore,  more money, to those newspapers (and TV stations) that support it and less of it to those who don’t.

And that, by the way, is a waste of money because the independent newspapers have a higher readership than those that are party controlled.

When I worked in London, the head of the Special Branch (and they know these things) told me: “There are more card-carrying communists on the Financial Times and more members of the Tory party on the Daily Mirror than on any other newspapers.”

None of that was reflected in the output.

It was what we called a Free Press.