This op-piece is not an analysis of the election result. I have read so many of them that I have now become allergic, particularly by those who very clearly had a conclusion ready and played around the facts to prove it.
Saying that 60,000 not voting or invalidating their vote sent a signal is legitimate. But what that signal is can only be established by research. Since voting or not voting is tied to one’s values, the research will give us a good snapshot of where the country is and where it is going. It is not just the political parties which need this snapshot.
While this op-piece calls for research, its heading is inspired by fiction.
I recently watched Adrian Bol’s 2020 movie Legacy of Lies. The Guardian had described it as a “sappy action thriller undone by lack of smarts”. But it is that kind of movie I like to watch when I am too tired to read or to challenge my grey matter.
Besides, the title seemed right and fitting for the final week of the electoral campaign and while Russia was waging a war in Ukraine, where a good part of the film was shot.
At the very end of the film, the Ukrainian actress, Yulia Sobol, who played the part of a brave Ukrainian (more on her later), made this comment:
“The concept of objective truth is threatened everywhere. If the international press does not stand together, lies will be our history.”
I guess she will say it with more conviction now that her country is being ravished by that assassin named Vladimir Putin. This war, being described as the first social media war, is a showcase of the post-truth society at work. Russia keeps on repeating lies and more lies as if they were the truth and is doing this with a degree of success, not just with people in Russia.
It is a pity that social networks, instead of being webs of truth, are many times becoming webs of lies.
Away from propaganda, the result of the Russian aggression in Ukraine was succinctly and powerfully described by His Beatitude Sviatoslav, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church: “Mountains of corpses, rivers of blood, a sea of tears.”
The term ‘post-truth’, probably introduced in 2004 by American author Ralph Keyes, identifies a category of deceptive and “ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall just short of a lie”. This, according to Prof. Higgins, is accompanied by public acceptance of inaccurate and undefended allegations and outright denial of facts.
Donald Trump’s presidency has been dubbed the ‘post-truth presidency’ but his is not the only one. Consider the following tactics used by Trump. Faced by a tough question, he simply says that the journalist is politically motivated.
So long as PBS is totally owned by the government, it will not act with full journalistic integrity- Fr Joe Borg
Such accusations are common over here. Didn’t we have the face of a journalist on a billboard and lists of journalists circulated on social media, cynically listing journalists and others for ‘helping’ the Partit Laburista win the election?
Accused by journalists that he does not answer their questions, Trump quickly quips that he wants to answer questions and that he is totally in favour of the media.
Does anyone remember the prime minister’s reaction when Ivan Martin took him to task for refusing to be interviewed by independent journalists?
How should journalists in Malta react to the post-truth society?
Giving all sides of a story is a journalistic value. But bothsideism or the attitude of creating equivalency when equivalency there is not, has no journalistic value.
When Times of Malta revealed that Prime Minister Robert Abela did business with an alleged criminal, he reacted by saying that Mario de Marco had given legal services to the same person. A different news website reacted to this ħass and gass comparison (as we say in Maltese) with this headline: ‘Abela and de Marco worked for alleged criminal’. Incredible but true.
The experience in the US and other countries showed that fact-checking, while laudable and should be done, is not enough in post-truth societies. The internationally recognised media ethicist, Stephen Ward (2018), suggests that we also need “journalism beyond facts: interpretative journalism that is informed by, but not reducible, to facts”. As Christians et al (2020, from whom I used some ideas and quotes for this op-piece) write, news has to be an intelligent account of the day’s events in a context that gives them meaning.
Strive for journalism to be constitutionally recognised as the fourth pillar of society. The prime minister lampooned this idea some weeks ago but now included it in Labour’s electoral manifesto.
Damascene conversions by politicians on the eve of elections are not to be trusted, particularly when such promises are lumped in a document together with the promise that Malta’s public latrines will go hi-tech. We journalists have to strive for this recognition.
Publish uncomfortable facts. Many were quite rightly shocked when PBS did not highlight what Pope Francis said about corruption and illegality. No surprise there. Xandir Malta had heavily manipulated the ħasla papali (papal telling-off) that Pope St John Paul II had given Dom Mintoff. (Then and more now, the visuals and not the pope’s speech are what sticks in people’s minds.) So long as PBS is totally owned by the government, it will not act with full journalistic integrity, and, if it did, it would not be perceived to be doing so. I have repeatedly proposed that a different ownership model be considered.
At the finale of Legacy of Lies, we discover that the Ukrainian journalist was, in fact, a Russian spy. Woe to journalists who betray their mission by not working hard for a legacy of truth.