‘Politico’ doesn’t know the half of it

Once – and only once, that I remember – I was given a spot of friendly advice that actually worked in practice. 

I was planning a trip abroad, and wondered what travel guide to buy (if any). A friend suggested that, before making any decision, I should consult various editions about Malta. That way, I’d be able to tell at a glance whether the researchers had really done their homework… and by extension, whether they can be trusted when writing about other parts of the world. 

It worked a charm, I must say. Reading various ‘guides’ to the Maltese islands, I discovered all sorts of things about my own country that I’d simply never heard before. For instance, that the Maltese language had… ‘ancient Pubic roots’. 

OK, OK, I know what they were trying to say there. It’s true we all talk a lot of bollocks, there’s no use denying it… but that’s taking it a bit too far, don’t you think?

Anyway: even without the glaring misprint, the link with the language of the Phoenicians was debunked more than half a century ago. And on a separate note: it was Benjamin Disraeli who said that Valletta was a ‘city [of palaces] built by gentlemen for gentlemen’… and not Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, or Winston Churchill, as claimed to this day by various online travel sites.

In the end, it fell to Lonely Planet (if I remember correctly) to get at least the basic historical facts right… and that was enough for me to place a fragile, generic trust in the brand.

What made the advice invaluable, however, was its applicability to almost any other sphere of life. Restaurant reviews, film reviews, car reviews, video-game reviews… whatever your fancy, if it concerns accuracy of information, or quality of opinion… all you have to do is examine the same source’s take on a subject you already know.

It was only recently, however, that I discovered its applicability to international news items about Malta. Let’s face it, there haven’t been a great many in the last few decades. Closing an eye at Papal visits, mass evacuations from Libya, and isolated events like the Bush-Gorbachev summit in 1990… not a very great deal that actually happens here can ever be expected to interest the international media. In fact, you almost have to go all the way back to 1942 to find Malta regularly featuring in the news… a classic case of ‘no news is good news’, if ever I saw one. 

Well, that seems to be slowly changing. In the last two years alone, there were at least two Malta-related issues that triggered widespread media interest in the rest of the world. And while the news may not be as bad as the Malta blitz… let’s just say it is still the kind of media coverage we could well do without.

The first was the ‘Golden Passport’ scheme, which elicited (and still elicits) a barrage of near-unanimous criticism of Malta. The second was, of course, the Panama Papers: in which Malta emerged as the only country where a serving government official was directly named in the scandal… and, unaccountably, is still a government official all these months later.

In any case: enough has been said about both those issues to be repeated here. What I find more interesting is the perspective this sudden spate of coverage casts on our country… compared with what we already know about it ourselves.

As with a travel guide – or any other form of critical article – inaccuracies and/or generalisations will stick out like a sore thumb. (Recently, I stumbled on an international pro-life blogpost which quoted Prof. Arnold Cassola as ‘the head of the Maltese government’!) And if you follow the local media as a journalist does – i.e., reading pretty much everything, whether it interests you or not – you will usually be able to identify the source of the information, too.

So when reporting on the 2011 divorce referendum, all the foreign newspapers without reliable local sources ended up quoting the ‘Gesu Iva, Divorzju Le’ billboard as if it were the official slogan of the ‘No’ campaign… when we all knew it was the private initiative of a tiny (and somewhat loopy) fringe movement.  

One article even described the Archbishop as ‘a figure whose authority is rarely questioned in Malta’… notwithstanding the fact that the same Archbishop is actively vilified and insulted by roughly half the country, almost every single day.

Applying the same process used with the Lonely Planet, these details make the difference between an accurate, dependable news source, and one which merely regurgitates the work of others without any verification. I am sorry to say that in most cases, it is the established newspapers that fail this simple test. 

Conversely, it is the less likely news sources which tend to get their facts right. Recently, a Seattle-based magazine called ‘Politico’ has – somewhat bizarrely, I admit – taken an interest in Maltese politics. Last week, I quoted from an article about the impact the Panama Papers are likely to have on Malta’s EU Presidency bid; this week, Politico ran a brief story about the involvement of the Nationalist Opposition in the ‘Golden Passport’ scheme… i.e., the same scheme the PN has been busy lambasting these past two years.

Factually, the claims are nothing new. We all knew that “several opposition Nationalist MPs have links to companies involved with the country’s controversial passports-for-cash scheme, despite their party opposing it”; and that the party’s president, Anne Fenech, is a partner at a law firm that acts as an agent for the same scheme.

What we may not have known – or what we chose to overlook – is how such information would be received by third parties: i.e, people who know nothing about the complex network of entrenched hypocrisy that underpins our entire political structure; and who therefore naively interpret such information for what it really is.

Strange as it may seem to us, a website like Politico – which has no reason under the sun not to take an objective view of the situation – seems to see this as a conflict of interest. Even the reporting – with its emphasis on ‘despite their party opposing it’ – suggests that this was the most newsworthy aspect of the revelation to begin with.

And just consider how anomalous it would sound, to someone who doesn’t actually know the people involved: a political party whose members privately profit from a questionable scheme, while criticising the same scheme loudly in public. 

Yes, you can see how that would be considered odd (to say the least) in any other part of the world. And yet, when these same facts emerged locally several months ago, the Nationalist Party simply brushed them all aside as if it were the most natural thing in the world. ‘That? Oh, we do it all the time. What’s new’?

Even more bizarrely, the general public bought into that argument without even batting an eyelid. ‘That? Well, what about it? They’re politicians, aren’t they? Isn’t that exactly the sort of blatant hypocrisy we have come to expect from politicians these days…?’

And of course, you can’t really argue with them either. It’s true. The Golden Passport scheme is not the only example, and nor is the Nationalist Party.

The Sliema skyscraper and Mriehel towers work just as well. Both projects were conceived under a Nationalist administration, against a backdrop where large-scale construction projects were the order of the day… often fast-tracked by a government which (plus ca change) seemed hell-bent on facilitating piecemeal development at all costs.

Both, in brief, were brainchildren of the same ideological commitment that Simon Busuttil, today, calls the ‘Dubai-ification of Malta’. But while the PN now sees this as a problem… it somehow fails to see its own hypocrisy, when criticising two projects that are ultimately the fruit of its own past policies.

I could go on, and the list would be practically endless. You could include almost every single statement by the Labour government since 2013… most of which merely blamed the former Nationalist administration for the mess that they were elected to clean up… but somehow managed to make worse.

This, too, is something the entire country seems to have simply accepted as inevitable: as if political hypocrisy was as much part of our local character as hobz biz-zejt.

Sorry, folks, but… no. We may have inured ourselves to humungous contradictions, and perfected the fine art of pretending they don’t actually exist. But the contradictions do exist, and they are perfectly visible to everyone else. It is not enough for the Nationalist Opposition to shrug off criticism of its role in the Golden Passport Scheme with a simple ‘cosi fan tutti’. If it is to salvage its credibility as an alternative government, it has to regularise the position of all its members to conform to its party’s stated line.

Otherwise, the PN will reduce itself to the embarrassing status of a war profiteer: loudly condemning the ongoing atrocities, but quietly amassing a small fortune out of proceedings anyway. 

Above all, both parties need to remember that the local perspective is no longer the only yardstick against which they shall be measured. It is easy to get away with murder, when your only judge is a cynical electorate that has long given up on the prospect of ‘honest politics’. It is when you start measuring up to the standards of other countries that the problems invariably arise.

Small wonder the rest of the EU (if Politico is to be believed… which seems reasonable enough, given its accuracy in other things) now has doubts about Malta’s readiness to assume the Presidency next year. We are gradually revealing ourselves to be a country where neither government nor opposition has the foggiest notion of what ‘governance’ even means.