Journalism of the Stone Age

Ok, let’s try and work this one out. An Italian company claims it is owed €3.5 million by the Maltese government, over stone works for the new Parliament building in Valletta.

What does this company do? Does it:

a) Open a court case to retrieve its dues?

b) Hire a debt collector to intimidate the Maltese government into coughing up the money?

c) Decapitate a prize racehorse, and place the severed head between Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s sheets?

d) Get an Italian journalist to present an entirely one-sided view of the argument on TV, in order to turn the affair into a trial by mass media?

Naturally, the logical and respectable answer would have to be ‘a’. That is what honest, law-abiding people do when they are owed large sums of money… and are also sufficiently confident that the law would actually weigh in their favour.

In this case, however, the answer was a combination of ‘b’ and ‘d’. (Note: I suspect option ‘c’ was discarded only because Muscat doesn’t happen to own any prize racehorse of his own… and, let’s face it, his prize greenfinch just wouldn’t have had the same effect).

So CFF Filiberti called in ‘Le Iene’: a satirical show on Italian TV, and also the title of the Italian version of Quentin Tarantino’s classic 1990s crime thriller, ‘Reservoir Dogs’.

Hmm. Already, something feels deeply wrong. It reminds me of another Tarantino movie, Pulp Fiction… in particular, the scene when Vincent Vega accidentally shoots the black kid’s head off in the back of the car. It’s in situations like those – i.e., when you know you don’t have a legal leg to stand on – that you call in ‘The Wolf’. Otherwise, you’d just go through the regular channels like everyone else: which, in this case, would be the law courts.

But back to the Stone Age. I watched that Iene episode, and from the outset things looked just slightly… odd. For instance: we were all expected to simply take on trust the journalist’s claim that CFF Filiberti really is owed 3.5 million by the Maltese government: just because the company’s CEO, Mr Filiberti, said so on camera.

Excuse me, but anyone can claim to be owed millions. Where was the proof? We were fleetingly shown snippets of a contract in which the word ‘joint venture’ was highlighted… we heard Mr Filiberti mumble something unintelligible about how his company was awarded a contract through public tender… At no point, however, was the actual contractual obligation made in any away clear.

This does not really surprise me. In this particular case, there doesn’t seem to even be any contract signed between the government of Malta and CFF Filiberti at all. The ‘joint venture’ alluded to above subcontracted Filiberti separately: so if there is any issue of outstanding payments, it is actually between the primary contractor and sub-contractors… not with the government at all.

Meanwhile, the ‘Iene’ journalist interviewed the CEO of Filiberti – giving him a platform to air his grievances entirely uncontested – and also Joseph Muscat and Stefan Zrinzo Azzopardi. Strangely, however, he did not interview anyone representing any part of the rest of the joint venture. Why was no comment elicited from BIB JV (which originally subcontracted the Italian company)?

BIB JV’s lawyer is Dr Peter Fenech – a man not exactly known for his closeness with the Labour government – and in recent weeks he has separately rubbished Filiberti’s claims all over the media. Among these contested claims is the accusation that local suppliers (Q Stone) had not only supplied faulty material, but had even hidden the test results. 

Fenech denied this repeatedly, pointing out that: “The issues of cost, transportation and other matters in dispute between CFF Filiberti and the supplier are internal issues which have no bearing on the question of quality of the stone.”

You will note from that last remark that the nature of the ‘dispute’ suddenly looks very different indeed from the way it was presented on Le Iene. The disagreement in question does not seem to be between CFF Filiberti and the Maltese government over payment for works rendered… but between CFF Filiberti and the local supplier, over costs pertaining to ‘transportation and other matters’.

Meanwhile, it bears repeating that the Iene feature did not even come close to establishing that this Italian company is even owed anywhere near that kind of money. It is simply an unsubstantiated claim, made by one party (Filiberti) and hotly contested by all others (i.e., both the Maltese government, and the rest of the joint venture). So why are we expected to believe it in the absence of evidence? And isn’t it incumbent on the journalist presenting the feature to prove that this debt actually exists… before pointing accusatory fingers at ‘questi furbi maltesi’, ‘maledetti e stra-maledetti’, ‘no Alpitur, ai-ai-ai-ai’… etc.?

This brings us to the most downright suspicious aspect of Le Iene’s coverage: the undisguised ‘us against them’ approach.

I am not exactly the type to automatically take offence at sleights against the Maltese by foreigners – I’m quite happy to leave that to Joseph Calleja, who sounds a lot better than I do when venting patriotic anger – but there is something clearly untoward about premising the entire argument on the basis that an ‘honest, hard-working Italian compatriot’ has been cheated out of his dues by a bunch of Maltese crooks.

Whichever way you look at the issue… that was the colour of the Iene feature. I need hardly add that it does not quite match the colour of the issue when seen from practically any other angle.

I suspect we shall now have to await the outcome of a very lengthy adjudication process, to determine if CFF Filiberti is indeed owed anywhere near the figures bandied about on that programme (and by whom) – a process that should really have taken place before Italian journalists went ahead and prejudiced the entire case. I won’t predict the outcome, but I have been told – off the record, by people who know the contracts and agreements governing this particular project in considerable detail – that in reality, CFF Filiberti “does not have a legal leg to stand on”, and that ‘Le Iene’ have been led by the nose. 

If these people turn out to be correct… what sort of journalistic leg would ‘Le Iene’ be left with, anyway? It’s the sort of journalism that assumes one side of any given dispute is right, simply because it happens to be of your own nationality.  The sort of journalistic standards you’d expect from the Stone Age…