The Broadcasting Authority (BA) should seriously consider taking out a patent. The discovery that face masks can be used as gags is likely to generate vigorous interest among the rulers of the not-so-free world.
Last Thursday, the BA issued a press release (irony unintended, I think) which informed the public that questions by the press at COVID-19 press conferences (irony overload) would not be broadcast on the state media.
While journalists may still ask questions, those questions and the answers to them are no longer in our interest. Ours is not to make reply or to reason why, but to shut up and listen.
The BA may be guilty of plagiarism here. Its press release reads suspiciously like a manual for press freedom used in certain other countries. I may be wrong here, since neither my Belarusian nor my Korean are up to scratch. Still, here’s my best translation:
“The Broadcasting Authority, so as not to diminish the value of press conferences on matters of national interest … rules that questions by the press will not be broadcast by the state media.”
Now the ‘national interest’ is the reddest of all red flags. It’s the equivalent of Trump’s ‘fake news’. The so-called press conferences at which the leader of the free world refuses to answer questions he deems to be ‘fake’, asked by journalists he rubbishes as ‘dishonest’, are legendary.
But more on that later, because there’s a sea of other red flags to deal with first.
Take the reasoning behind the ban. The press release makes it clear that the BA’s key task is to ensure that the state channels run on “balance” and “impartiality”. So far, so true. Surely the most effective way to achieve that would be to let journalists ask as many questions as they like, in as free and public a way as possible.
Except the BA’s solution is better than that. According to the authoritative sages, the best way to achieve balance and impartiality is to entirely banish the press from the public eye: if there are no questions at all for us to follow, there cannot be unbalanced and impartial ones.
The last time I came across perversion on such a grand scale was in an eyewitness account of Jonestown.
It gets worse, because the BA also complained that some journalists had a habit of asking ‘unexpected’ questions “mistoqsijiet mhux mistennija da parti tal-ġurnalisti”. Unexpected as opposed to what exactly? Planted questions? Rhetorical ones? Questions by Brian Hansford?
No matter, because the BA has ammo to spare. One argument is that the COVID-19 press conferences are purely informative: they concern public health matters and are apolitical by nature. Therefore, any attempt by journalists to ask politically- tainted questions would poison the whole thing.
The ‘national interest’ is the reddest of all red flags- Mark Anthony Falzon
The problem is that both information and public health can be deeply political. Certainly, the COVID-19 press conferences are, especially when addressed by the prime minister on one of his trips from his seat in Sicily (medieval history, too, repeats itself.)
The ‘information’ given at these conferences tends to be triumphalist and self-congratulatory. It tells of a government working tirelessly to defend its people against the enemy. It also ‘informs’ us about certain decisions that are nothing if not political – the decision to maroon migrants offshore, for example, preferably on red harbour-cruise boats.
And so on. The point is that the BA chooses to see nothing political about any of that and everything political about unexpected questions by journalists. If that’s balance and impartiality, the red boats are blue.
But back to the nation. According to the BA, COVID-19 is a matter of national interest “suġġett ta’ portata nazzjonali” and, therefore, above politics. Which rather makes me suspect that the people at the BA could do with a crash course in nationalism. That’s because I can’t think of anything more political than nationalism and the nation state.
It is, in fact, fascists who tend to peddle the canard that politics and the nation don’t mix. Not for fascists the fray of parties and the pettiness of competing interests and beliefs.
In their place, you get blokey things like ‘one blood’, ‘national unity government’ and, yes, ‘the national interest’ (in the singular).
The BA librarian would be well-advised to acquire a copy of Bernard Crick’s 1962 classic. You have to start somewhere to understand why government hacks like Brian Hansford spent the first-wave months wrapped in the Maltese flag and singing Viva Malta. Not that he’s a fascist. He’s just a Labourite who wishes everyone else was.
I’m saying that I’ve had it up to here with the national interest strangling political debate on matters like migration and now public health. If anyone as much as mentions the ‘ballun politiku’ (political football), I should certainly do some strangling of my own. That, or ask some unexpected, unbalanced and partial questions at a press conference.