Beyond the inevitable political rhetoric, this year’s budget speeches by the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader hinged on one simple yet devastating point. Both political leaders contested each other’s facts and figures. Remove this disagreement from the fray and there is practically no real and substantive debate left. Without their disagreements on what the facts are, there was no residual politics left to speak of.
That the government and the Opposition give a different diagnosis of the economic patient is understandable. It comes with democratic territory. The government is bound to see the patient recovering more quickly than he actually is. And the Opposition is equally driven to see the patient regressing faster than he is.
Yet different interpretations of the way the economy is faring is not what is at issue. The political contestation is not about the diagnosis. The two political parties do not disagree over the policies in, say, tourism, taxation and fiscal management. Rather, they tear each other apart over whether revenue from tourism has increased, government intake from taxation has changed and whether the deficit is really decreasing.
At the risk of belabouring the metaphor, the two parties did not debate the patient’s diagnosis. They had a market brawl by his bedside over his symptoms. And this is what is reducing political debate to a complete sham. When the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition cannot even agree on whether the latter’s jacking up of the water and electricity rates in 1997 was higher that the former’s two weeks ago, it is clear that we are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
In 2005, with Malta firmly in Europe, this sort of childish irresponsibility is just not on anymore. With so many economic, social and political challenges on our doorstep, this country simply cannot tolerate dangerous political games with its future.
The sad consequence of this incessant bickering over the “facts” is that people are baffled, dazed and confused. They have no alternative but to scratch their head and turn off politics in even larger droves. With their remote control in hand, they switch to some reality show which, in comparison, appears to be more in tune with their lives than whatever their elected representatives are saying in Parliament.
Irresponsible and mediocre politicians are to blame for giving birth to this confused and confusing state of affairs. They are the ones who attempt to discredit irrefutable facts to be able to sustain non-existent arguments. They are the ones who prefer to obfuscate rather than debate.
But if there is a group of people who are even more culpable for this malaise it is us, the men and women in journalism. We are equally responsible, if not more, for allowing people to be confused by their political leaders. Allow me to venture a view on how I arrived to this conclusion.
In Malta we have a rather perverse journalistic culture. Most journalists accept as fact whatever party leaders utter without analysing it. Rather than filter what is said and check the veracity of the uttered “facts”, they pass them on in their original form to their readers and viewers.
When the Prime Minister says that income from tourism is X, the journalist passes it on as if it were fact. When the Opposition leader says that it is X minus a few million, the journalist passes it on as if it were fact too. The journalist does not take it upon himself to sort out and analyse which one of the two is telling the truth and which one is lying. As a result, the two contradictory “facts” continue to float out there in the public realm, impervious of each other.
Why does this happen? Simple. For a journalist to find out who is telling the truth is hard work, much more laborious than just being a relayer of words from the political leaders’ lips to the viewers’ eyes and ears. To get to the bottom of things, research, perseverance and canniness are required.
Secondly, in our perverse journalistic culture, analysing conflicting sets of data supplied by the two political lands amounts to being “political”, of not being “neutral”. If a journalist conducts an objective analysis of the two sets of data and discovers which the correct one is and publishes what he finds, he is instantly accused of partisanship by the “side” that was found to be wrong.
Ironically, in Malta, the land where truth is fiction and vice versa, a journalist is accused of being partisan the moment he or she attempts to be a real one. Truly a sad, sick and sickening situation. But if it persists the only people at fault are us, the journalists who allow it to be so.
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