After 2015, we’re going to need more courage and compassion

So, what exactly does it mean to be a journalist today?

In 2001, this question was taken up by the great Indro Montanelli in the Berlusconi-owned Corriere della Sera.

To interpret information, was his answer. Not simply to report the news like the journalist of yesteryear. Secondly, she cannot be boring. Thirdly, they must be judiciously independent of owners’ agendas and equally questioning of editors and their interests, and the pressures visited upon them by politics and business.

I guess it is a complex balancing act.

Journalists who simply report the news need not necessarily have boring careers; reporters who don’t enjoy prodding and probing people in authority and those whose impropriety must be exposed must be wondering what they are really doing; those who grovel at the village’s big men (and women) – the football club presidents, the mayors, the CEOs and business scions, the party men and women, the MPs – are content to kowtow and defer, and are inimical to the spirit of public interest; those who submit to the demands of PR handlers and political spokespersons need to muster the moxie to send them packing (when necessary of course…).

It can be all too much for people starting out in this world, but at MaltaToday, I feel it has been crucial to foster some kind of osmosis that can set a standard, a tradition of reporting and digital innovation among journalists.

Like Montanelli’s hit-list, we want journalists to have good memories and a sense of history that guides them in an ever-changing world without forgetting what came before; we encourage critical thinking, not neutered passiveness at the issues that affect people’s everyday lives; we try to ‘say it as it is’ because readers want their intellect to be respected; and we try to question everything, even internally, until the argument leaves us hoarse.

I have worked here since September 2002 and I will readily admit to this newspaper’s errant ways in its journey towards a form of mature standing, journalistically, socially, even financially. It was all part and parcel of a nascent form of journalism in Malta to stop at nothing when it comes to reporting the news.

But believe me that our values have been borne of an authentic experience of critical thought, not spectacle: a belief in the European project, the need to tip the balance in favour of the environment, justice and fairness in business and public administration, political transparency and meritocracy, and respecting people’s freedom to choose the way they live their lives, and the respect of universal, fundamental human rights.

And these beliefs have usually pitted us against politicians of all hues, size and stature, private interest lobbies, employers’ associations and unions, the religious establishment, businesspeople, and more often that not, construction magnates, the conservative right-wing and their fascist cousins.

Today I feel that even with journalists who passed through this newsroom and went on to new pastures, their legacy lives on in our newsroom osmosis. MaltaToday’s stories set the agenda, it serves readers because it is ultimately answerable to them for its continued survival, it challenges people’s perceptions of what the newspaper is, and it is trying to constantly innovate. Regrets, I’ve had but few. I wish the pace of change could only come ever faster.

And of our journalists I want to tell you what an authentic lot they all are: suspicious of political loyalties that would otherwise numb the power of the question, disdainful of MPs’ vanities and their thirst for public adoration, and ultimately interested in what the reader wants to ask the people in power.

We tread a tightrope of journalistic rigour that is constantly under attack by business and political interests, on which – it must be said – our own financial longevity also depends. If this were the challenge of 2015, it has always been so and will remain as such. The same could be said for citizen-journalists and bloggers who forgo the necessity of rigourous fact-checking for sensationalist be-there-first splashes. We don’t want to go down that road.

We also live in constant questioning of the way we live our own personal lives. Long hours in the newsroom sacrifices time that should be dedicated to families and recreational activities, fitness and small pleasures; and we contend with a large barrage of online criticism, daily pressures from angry gatekeepers barking down the phone line, and monkeys throwing peanuts at us.

We equally have to take stock of our own errors, when our zeal invites misrepresentation, our sense of public propriety goes haywire with personal antipathies coming to the fore, or when our superego turn us into obsessive critics to serve some political master rather than the reader.

And as Maltese journalists, we must always keep in mind that the most-read news item of the day on an island of 420,000 might be the low-cost airline’s 24-hour seat sale. And why not… But elsewhere in the world, the tragedy of Europe’s reaction to migration, our inaction on climate change, the terrorism fostered from the sheer scale of home-grown inequality and the war machine, and the future of the tottering European colossus must always be ever-present in our minds, so that perspective and context can temper and sober up our otherwise provincial concerns.

2016 will be a year in which we might have to consider more and more the depletion of two precious raw materials of the human condition: compassion, and courage.

The annual celebration of the birth of a Galilean refugee should spur some thought for those whom persecution pushes towards us, demanding we succour them; whose lives are rendered unliveable by climate change and by trade tariffs fixed by powerful nations; and for those even in countries like Greece, whose lives were dealt with mercilessly by European finance ministers… 

Nothing touched me this year as much as the Paris attacks did. Generation Bataclan was born with a determination to keep living, loving, and drink, sing, work and play as it always did. The world is a terrible place. But journalists should also help people comprehend it, to maybe help them face its complexity without fear, but with empathy.