Prime Minister Joseph Muscat has refused to be interviewed on the online programme produced and presented by The Malta Independent, the now familiar INDEPTH.

He has also shied away from confronting Nationalist Party leader Simon Busuttil in what remains as the most popular TV discussion show Xarabank, although the number of viewers keeps shrinking.

Now, if the debate with Busuttil were to be in English, I would have understood the reasoning behind Muscat’s refusal. The PM stutters and struggles in that language, as could be seen in the press conference he delivered with Juncker a few days ago (and anywhere else, for that matter), whereas Busuttil is flawless and impeccable in English, and does not punctuate his conversation with the “ems” and the “ehs” so typical of someone who is not at ease.

On Xarabank, with an audience and viewership mostly made up of low class people, the atmosphere is ideal for Muscat. He has been turning down the offer for the past three years, we’re told. A report in The Malta Independent exposing the Prime Minister’s reluctance to face his political counterpart has not been denied, neither by the government nor the PL, who are always ready to reply to anything that stirs the waters. It’s therefore clear that it is not fake news, the PL’s new buzzword.

By the way, it’s quite ironic that, while the PL and its friendly media including l-orizzont accuse others of fake news, last week we had the perfect example of what fake news really is – when the PL media reported that Beppe Fenech Adami and Tonio Fenech had been invited to testify before the European Parliament’s Panama Papers Committee, but then omitted to mention that Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri are also on the list. It’s no wonder that Labour supporters are duped into believing that everything is perfect.

Back to Joseph Muscat as his fear of the media. In Opposition, he was always ever so available in front of the cameras and microphones. At the start of his tenure as head of government, this accessibility remained. But, as the scandals involving his government mounted – almost as from Day 1 – he started to look very uncomfortable each time he faced journalists.

I am not an expert in body language, but it has happened often that Muscat turned away and gave his back to reporters who asked difficult questions. It is a sign of uneasiness. Worse than this, there were times when he escaped through back doors and emergency exits to completely avoid journalists.

Matters became worse ever since the Panama Papers scandal broke last year, a story that reverberates right to this very day, and which has seen the PM become increasingly unwilling to deal with questions on the matter. He probably thought that the story would die within a few weeks, but given its magnitude it hasn’t.

Given that he chose to defend Minister Konrad Mizzi and OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri, he has become part of the scandal.

And so he is keen to appear on programmes to speak about his diet, but is afraid to face hard questions.