There was public interest value in journalists covering leaked WhatsApp chats between Rosianne Cutajar and Yorgen Fenech, the Broadcasting Authority has said.
The regulator made the assessment as it looked into a complaint filed by the Nationalist Party in which it accused PBS of breaking the law by not reporting on the content of those chats.
While the BA dismissed the PN complaint and noted that PBS had in fact covered the Cutajar-Fenech issue in various ways, it endorsed PN lawyers’ arguments about the conversations’ newsworthiness.
“It is true that the chats issue was of public interest, due to their relevance,” the BA said in its conclusions.
That observation is likely to be welcomed by Mark Camilleri, the author and blogger who released the cache of messages online last March, in apparent breach of a court order that banned any publication of communications obtained from Fenech’s phone, without exception.
Fenech stands accused of complicity in the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia and messages extracted from his phone and laptop form part of the evidence presented in that case.
Camilleri, who lives abroad, is now under investigation for contempt of court for having leaked the conversations. If charged and found guilty, he could be jailed for up to one month.
The leaked conversations revealed how Fenech and Cutajar had an intimate relationship and spoke over WhatsApp on an almost daily basis.
The conversations confirmed Times of Malta’s 2020 exclusive that Cutajar, at the time a Labour MP, was given thousands of euro in cash by Fenech for having brokered a property deal he was involved in.
They also revealed how Cutajar had leaned on Fenech to glean information about political manoeuvring and expressed frustration about her failure to make it into Joseph Muscat’s cabinet.
“Now I’ve stopped giving a damn,” she told Fenech. “I’ll become a consultant with Pierre of ITS, and pocket another wage. I don’t care, everybody pigs out.”
Prime Minister Robert Abela initially defended Cutajar, saying she was being humiliated by a “misogynistic” Camilleri. But as pressure on the Qormi MP mounted, Abela changed tack and forced Cutajar to resign as a Labour MP. She remains in parliament as an independent MP.
In its decision on the PN complaint, the broadcasting regulator noted that PBS had reported most of the salient points that emerged from the chats. The broadcaster had to report on issues of public interest while also being careful not to breach a court-imposed ban, the regulator noted as it dismissed the PN complaint.
The regulator was also asked to rule on two other, separate complaints by the PN.
In both cases, the PN accused PBS of having discriminated against it when it failed to cover two press statements it issued on March 24 about an industrial dispute involving nurses and national debt statistics.
In the first case, involving the MUMN dispute, the regulator noted that the news bulletin in question had covered the dispute and even reported what PN leader Bernard Grech said about it.
While PBS should have covered the PN statement, its failure to do so “does not render PBS a machine for state propaganda,” the regulator concluded.
In the second instance, regarding a PN press release commenting on national debt statistics, the regulator was more categorical.
It noted that PBS had reported on the National Statistics Office release about rising national debt and that the station’s own internal guidelines stipulated that the PBS newsroom should not cover political commentary of official statistics.
The BA therefore dismissed the PN complaint.