It’s not often I find myself speechless but it does get harder to find the right things to say in the face of so many happenings. Many people feel unsafe, others feel anxious about their future and that of their children. Truly, who can blame them?

In April of this year, Malta slipped another four places down the World Press Freedom Index. We are in not particularly great company with Kyrgystan, Haiti, Albania and Sierra Leone. The only other two European member states who performed worse than us are Hungary and Bulgaria.

We have tumbled down 36 places in the last seven years alone. This would be seen to be a grave problem in most civilised countries, however, over here, it seems to have had the wonderful effect of spurring people to come out and confirm that everything that Reporters Without Borders have surmised from our current state of affairs is, in fact, true.

Without requiring any prompting, former television presenter, and from the way he speaks, aspiring supreme leader Jean Claude Micallef unironically stated that journalists should have warrants.

Would a government give a warrant to someone whose job it is to hold it in check?- Anna Marie Galea

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for impartial, well-written pieces by people who are actually able to write (that part always helps), but I suppose the next questions that one would ask is who exactly would be handing out these warrants? On what grounds would they be given? Why would you give a warrant to one person and not another? Would a government give a warrant to someone whose job it is to hold it in check? What kind of press freedom could we then hope for or expect?

This is, of course, not even touching on the fact that some of the primary modes in which people receive their only news on the daily in this country come from two very biased party machines whose only interest is to continue to strengthen their own propaganda narratives.

If you tried switching on the television on both stations during an election or every day really, you’d be easily convinced you were either living in two different countries or having a bout of schizophrenia. Maybe someone should let Micallef know that this isn’t a budget version of 1984 (the book not the year, although that was quite scary here too) and more control over the press is definitely the last thing this or any government needs.

Of course, this disastrous debacle was quickly pushed into the background by Melvin Theuma’s alleged attempted suicide. I’m not going to speculate about what happened and what didn’t because we don’t yet know for certain, but what I will say is that a better job could have been done in protecting the star witness of the most high-profile criminal case Malta has ever seen.

We already have missing tapes, disappearing phones and the authorities of the time making it sound like they were going on a day trip to Catania to buy a kilo of mortadella instead of doing the job they were meant to be. What we don’t need is one of the only links we have managed to pin down between murderer and victim (and barely at that) to suddenly be severed.

It’s things like these that continue to convince the world press and indeed the thinking man on the street that people who were formerly in the highest echelons of our political class have many things to hide. If you really want to find out the truth like you keep saying you do, maybe you should do a better job of not bungling the basics. It’s embarrassing, disgraceful and disgusting.

Just another week in paradise.

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