You toucha my foghorn, I smasha your face

I wasn't there to personally witness the glorious graduation punch-up last Thursday - you know, the one that landed a University professor in hospital with a broken shoulder, and a graduate in court on assault and battery charges - but I did read all about it in an article in Insider magazine, and... mmm, how can I put this? Am I right in assuming it was actually a student assignment for a credit entitled 'How to maximise bias, distort all the relevant facts of the case, and still give the impression that you're trying to be impartial'...?

No? Pity, because if it were, it would doubtless have qualified for a straight A at the very least...

OK, OK, I know what I'm letting myself in for here. It is, after all, rather unfair on my part to turn the big guns on what is ultimately a fairly unassuming and mostly harmless little student publication - and a not-half bad one, either, at least most months of the year.

Seriously, though. 'Commerce graduate arrested after fight on campus'? I would have thought 'University professor hospitalised after graduation punch up' slightly more appropriate. But not only did the headline overlook the serious injury sustained by Professor Charles Sammut, Dean of the Science Faculty, as a result of an altercation with a troop of (reportedly) drunken idiots... but somehow, the entire article managed to altogether omit this detail, too: even after the omission was pointed out by yours truly in an online comment, and had in any case been widely reported elsewhere.

Which, I suppose, raises an interesting point for class discussion: how on earth can an entire news report specify that a student was arrested and charged in court for an offence... without actually mentioning what this offence was supposed to have been? 

Oh, wait, maybe I misread the report. This is the relevant paragraph, you can decide for yourselves: "Contrary to reports that the Dean was man handled [sic], eye witnesses claimed that the Dean, upon entering the hall, angrily confronted one student, Granville Goodlip, taking from him a fog horn, which he then threw the horn to the ground [sic], causing it to shatter into several pieces..."

OK, let's close an eye at the small and quite frankly irrelevant grammatical and idiomatic hitches here and there (just this week I myself inadvertently wrote 'Police Corpse' instead of 'Corps' in a news article... and the mistake made it undetected all the way into the online version of MaltaToday. So there you have it: these things really do happen to the best of us...)

And while we're at it, let's also pretend we didn't notice that the 'eyewitnesses' mentioned in that paragraph were actually fellow graduates, participating in the same 'buscade' - great word, by the way: sounds like a special detachment of hired mediaeval assassins, only armed with acoustic guitars instead of crossbows - who may therefore be assumed to be somewhat slightly sympathetic towards Mr Goodlip from the outset.

But no, the problem here is twofold, and neither aspect has much to do with orthography.

One: the slant of the reporting seems altogether more concerned with rebutting other print versions of the same incident - hence 'contrary to reports': a turn of phrase repeated further down the same article - than with telling us what actually happened on campus that afternoon. So by extension, the motive was clearly to shift the onus of responsibility away from the students, and onto the shoulders (ahem) of the Dean himself... which by definition makes it less of a news report, and more of an apologia.

Two: judging only by the choice of details reported - as well as, by inference, the choice of details omitted - anyone would think that the main highlight of the entire incident was not so much the serious injury (not to mention indignity) sustained by a University professor; but rather, the fact that said professor had committed the unthinkable crime of... shattering a foghorn (one word, by the way... not unlike 'manhandled' and 'eyewitness', but like I said let's ignore all that.)

Right; now allow me to I admit that I am not exactly the most conversant man imaginable in the subject of musical instruments - having been informed since early childhood that I possess Van Gogh's ear for music, and all that - and as you can imagine I am less familiar still with the complexities of modern football hooliganism accessories.

But reading that article again, I just have to ask: is there something about foghorns in general - and in particular, their importance in the greater scheme of things - that I'm missing here? Since when are these infernal contraptions considered worthy of even a passing allusion... still less accorded such respect and veneration, that damage to one particular specimen should overshadow all other details of the case, including corresponding damage to a human scapula? (Note: pity it was a scapula and not a clavicle... otherwise we could have all had a nice little orchestra to add to the merriment...).

But back to the punch-up, which - just to give as complete a picture as possible of the bloodshed and sheer idiocy involved - also resulted in a broken nose for the student. I feel I ought to add, for fairness' sake, that I fully sympathise with Mr Goodlip on that particular score. Having broken my nose twice myself - once, believe it or not, as a result of a pillow fight, aged five or thereabouts - I can confirm that it is not exactly a pleasant experience. Mercifully I have to date been spared the added experience of a fractured scapula - but hey! For all I know, tomorrow I might bump into a drunk university graduate and accidentally shatter his foghorn... and if that happens, who can tell what part of my anatomy will pay the ultimate price for the transgression?

But this, I fear, only brings me to the truly disappointing thing about the way this entire incident seems to have played out in practice. Hand on heart, I can't really blame the author of the above-quoted article for having been so selective in the detail, and so clearly biased in the reporting. It is after all slightly unrealistic to expect any more from a university student aged around 19 or thereabouts... when career journalists and editors all around us do exactly the same - and much, much worse - on a daily basis, without anyone ever so much as batting an eyelid.

So allow me to be the first to drop all insinuations of superiority, and admit that this is precisely the standard of reporting we can after all expect, from the university of a country that allows blatant political bias to be passed off as 'news' every single minute of every single day.

And it also illustrates, with graphic precision, why our tendency towards bias has not only failed to improve in the 30-odd years I've been a consumer of news in this country... but has actually deteriorated.

So what I can say? Keep them coming, lads! We'll make propagandists of you yet...