If this government is in any way aiming to get back the public’s approval which it seems to be losing, surely the way ahead is not to continue doing things as it is doing, let alone let them get worse.

The way to the country, to the people, lies through the media and the government seems hell-bent to turn the media against it.

Now there may be a case for arguing that the media is in a rotten state and that the government must skip the media and speak to the people directly. There is a lot to say about the media and the media itself should be the first to make a critical self-assessment. As has been said elsewhere, the so-called liberalisation of the airwaves, surely not one of the Nationalist government’s best achievements, has landed the country with two television stations busy plugging the main parties’ schizophrenic points of view. And the main television station, even though economically reformed, is still very much under the minister’s finger, and without any real competition.

Most people get their news from television, whatever they may think of what the news say, while a decreasing number get their news from the newspapers. The Maltese language newspapers reflect the partisan approach of the two political television stations, so that leaves the country’s free, private and “independent” papers.

It is a very keen and competitive environment, although not as keen as abroad, and all papers are out to get the story and the audience and make an impact.

And the government is .., the government, in a way the enemy, or at least the target of most newspaper stories. For as one formerly very important person in this government used to say, the government is there, while the opposition is only the possible and potential government.

The way this government is handling the media is precisely the opposite how things should be done.

First of all, and this is not the first time this is being said, there is no centre in the government: it is every ministry on its own. Every ministry has its communications official, some of whom never even get down to actually meet and get to know the media. Mostly, the communications officers care only about their minister, even when an issue crops up which refers for instance to a minister’s private practice where the communications officer, who is employed by the government should have absolutely no role in ironing it out.

Besides, although they do have their own meetings regularly, there is still no such thing as a central source of information. If a journalist wants to get to know something which relates to two ministers, he is either fobbed off from one to the other or else he is given two non-identical replies. And as has been many times the case, there is no machinery to identify the real hot issues and to tackle them on a national basis. On the contrary, the tendency still is to tackle them on the ministerial level even when patently that ministry is mishandling the issue.

That means that in many occasions the public gets to hear of issues first from the Opposition media with its spin and interpretation and each time, each time, the government then has to come in to correct the wrong impression that has been allowed to be fostered. But the damage would by then have been done.

As to major issues, they continually and repeatedly slip through the media communicators’ hands, most of who do not have either the experience or the training to be able to assess news stories and their impact. Who chooses these people and why are these people chosen is one of those mysteries without any solution. Many of them and certainly many of the ministers seem to gauge their effectiveness by the amount of times the minister issues press releases, appears on TV and is given coverage. The story, no doubt apocryphal, is of a minister who was presented with a five-year plan for his ministry and threw it away saying he was more interested about media coverage for the next three years.

Just as in so many other things, this government found a civil service structure, called DOI, left it there and allows it to do its thing, but then set up a completely parallel structure called the ministers’ communication officers, left them all unco-ordinated and parallel to the DOI, side by side, and issuing one press release after another instead of truly focusing on the issue and trying to get to grips with the public. Does the public get any perception of a government addressing the complaints and the grumbles that surface through the media? Hardly. It is the government which speaks to the public through the media and the media is there to serve as the channel for the government’s communication.

You would not find Tony Blair nor even Silvio Berlusconi being so arrogant with their publics (even though most Englishmen and Italians would hotly disagree with this). And for precisely this reason Tony Blair is still there, Iraq war and all, and Silvio Berlusconi is still filling up one whole term ( a rarity in Italy). But then they dialogue, they listen, they note and even though they may not agree, you get a real response from them. In Malta one gets the impression that any dialogue is a one-way street: the government speaks and the country must listen. Just like in the good old times when they had the Rediffusion sets outside the police stations and they used to turn them on at news time so that people could listen, learn and obey.

The latest ventures by the government in the media field have been undiluted catastrophes, like calling a select few to Girgenti only to be caught out by the ‘excluded’ media. To claim that the lobby system works in Britain and thus, by extension, SHOULD work in Malta is to completely misunderstand the Maltese reality.

To ban publication by a paper of a relatively innocuous interview with the Film Commissioner just because the Commissioner did not clear the interview with the ministry is much worse than all the fall-out which could have happened if the interview itself was published and the Commissioner’s ear tweaked in private.

This last episode has then led to a quite serious coda: Minister Gatt claimed that just because he is politically responsible and has to face election every five years, he must be responsible for all decisions that the bodies under him take. How strange: we were under the impression that one very strong Nationalist principle in the 1980s was to cut down on the wide range of the ministers’ responsibilities and decisions because of what was happening with such a structure in place and instead replace it with a civil service that enjoys a certain autonomy, authorities that have an autonomy and structures of decision-taking that are transparent and open to discussion rather than being based on ‘The minister said so’.

Unless the government wants to go back to the Lorry Sant times, it is still in time to reverse direction.