I was delighted to learn that that old stalwart of Maltese left-wing journalism, Paul Carachi, had won this year’s “Gold Award”. Not only was it deserved, but certainly long overdue.

In the present media frenzy that pluralism and electronics have created over the past two decades, it is easy to overlook people who have given so much to the profession, rendering them but a wonderful memory in some people’s minds.

In other less hypocritical societies, retired journalists of whichever political stud-house are often appointed to various media-related national institutions as consultants, chairmen and board members. Here we tend to put them on a dusty shelf where, like valuable trophies, they can be brought down every now and then for a quick spit-and-polish.

Paul was one of a generation of journalists who taught us kids that no matter how hot the competition and the political landscape out there, camaraderie among journalists was as important.

Many of his contemporaries in full time journalism, people like Anthony Montanaro, Charles Grech Orr, Anton Cassar, John E. Mizzi, J.G. Vassallo and several others, established an unwritten form of ethics that inspired many of those who came after them.

They helped imbue the next generation of journalists, most of whom this time round had not been attached to the Strickland Press umbilical chord, and which included among others such names as Charles Mizzi, Lino Spiteri, Frans Camilleri, Victor Aquilina, Remig Sacco, Harold Scorey, Lino Cassar and Godfrey Grima, with the same predilection for fairness, mutual courtesy and a general feeling of trust. And yet, no one could for a single second doubt or begrudge their unquenchable thirst for a good story and professional one-upmanship.

I was fortunate to be in the next wave of media intakes very late in the 1960s when those two previous generations were still actively involved. It was a time when the media and its proprietors were finally doing some real soul-searching as they geared themselves up for the challenges ahead, particularly the surging influence of the electronic world.

As always in Malta, the political situation was raucously seething in its familiar, permanent state of turmoil. It did not, however, interfere in any way with the everyday relationship among journalists representing the whole political and commercial spectrum. This was sometimes taken to the hilarious extreme by such underhand arrangements as the unofficial pooling at the Law Courts and the House of Representatives to allow time for the younger guns to watch the new exciting film at one of the Valletta cinemas or to keep up with the latest romantic affair!

Sadly, by the late 1970s the journalistic scene – as well as the old political code of practice – started to change drastically. Suddenly, the newsprint war everyone had wisely taken for granted to be tomorrow’s dustbin lining, turned into an obvious souring of personal relationships.

The old camaraderie became an instant parody based on preconceived attitudes and mutual distrust, all of which were hideously perpetrated to a maximum during the 1980s, by which time the earlier generation of players in the field of the Maltese media had hung up their boots.

This is not a sentimental journey in rewind mode, but a genuine concern, lamenting the end of what once was a warm, albeit cynical, sphere of work. The creation of the Malta Press Club, in later years happily renamed L-Istitut tal-Gurnalisti Maltin (IGM), helped in no small way towards re-igniting the spark that was lost in the political tsunami of the 1980s when journalist gossiped, in ink and on the airwaves, about journalists, when politicians dictated the headlines to their dutiful subs and when credibility became a mere word in the dictionary. But things have never been the same.

It is at moments like the announcement of Paul Carachi’s award and my needing to get in touch recently with John E. Mizzi and the affable ex-Times master photographer, Frank Attard, that I realise the old spirit has not really been revived.

Their gentlemanly approach to my queries as well as their personal warmth felt like a breath of fresh air at a moment in time when most journalists don’t seem to have enough of it for others. And the unique experience is not new. I have such fond memories of Tony Montanaro’s pleasantness during stressful periods of his editorship, while Anton Cassar’s natural tendency to offer advice and to share ideas remains as persistent today as it was in his hey day.

What was it that moulded that generation, and what is lacking today? Better-trained and better-educated journalists make up the cream of today’s crop of journalists, yet the old camaraderie continues to crumble. It is not a question of the usual young upstarts on the scene messing things up. Many so-called young upstarts have, over the years, turned out to be our top media persons deservedly running newspapers, radio and television newsrooms. Something – somewhere – sometime – went absolutely wrong and the sour taste endures.

At one time, not so long ago, the same unsavoury situation crept into the deeper waters in which columnists swim, flap and flutter, yours truly included, strangely backed by their unseen features editors. It all developed into an ugly spectacle of mud-slinging that must have left most of our readers highly amused but also undoubtedly abused, since they rightly expect better cannon fodder from each and everyone of us.

Wasn’t it ironic, for example, that only last week, when I was unceremoniously used as a dartboard in a national Sunday Maltese language newspaper by way of accusing a politician of “wanting to turn the clock back”, for the same paper to misinterpret and misrepresent an event that occurred more than 30 years ago, that is when most of my generation were still young men and women pretending, like all young men and women of the time, to be communists, fascists and revolutionaries in the making? Who was trying to turn the clock back, then, I wonder.

If only we could at least have that old camaraderie back.