A free media is an essential element of a free and democratic society. In fact the media should act as the voice of conscience of society. It is therefore incumbent on journalists to bring to the attention of the public both the success and the failures of those who are entrusted with the management of our country.

In most democratic countries the media focuses on scrutinising the establishment to ensure that their actions favour the well being of society. They use the pen to challenge the might of the bureaucracy that has ways and means of hiding from society the mistakes and abuses of those who are in control of the machine of state.

But is this the situation in Malta? There is no doubt that our media is free to act in the way they like. We have some excellent investigative journalists with both a wealth of experience and formal training. But this in itself does not ensure that our media acts as the voice of conscience for our society.

The traditional sympathy of certain sections of the media for the Nationalist Party ensures that, however badly the government led by this party performs, their editorial line will, for most of the time, be slanted in favour of the government. Instead of challenging the establishment, this media condones gross errors of the political and executive class to protect it from the justifiable anger of the electorate.

Let me mention just two examples. Some time ago, the sheer waste of public funds by the Nationalist government in the jinxed investment in the Brindisi port was rarely taken up by certain sections of the media, which merely reported the charges made by the Labour Party. This was no petty issue yet the Maltese public was denied the opportunity of a non-political assessment of why things went so wrong in Brindisi and whether such waste could have been avoided.

More recently, I exposed the potential loss of a large plot of land with a market value of Lm10 million which is owned by Maltcom plc, but which a minister of the Nationalist administration had solemnly declared should be transferred back to public ownership. The case has been sent to our courts and only God knows what the outcome will be and when this issue will be resolved. The problem has been swept conveniently under the carpet.

The media once again ignored such an important incident of mismanagement. Hardly any editorial comments have been made to give the Maltese public an independent assessment of what went wrong in this matter. By doing this the pro-government media tried to convince public opinion that this was just an insignificant issue raised by the Labour Party to denigrate the government that does not deserve to be criticised.

But perhaps what is even worse is that other relatively minor incidents of the government’s mismanagement of the country are commented upon in several centimetres of editorial comment. By doing this the so-called independent media try to give the impression that the only things that are worth criticising in this administration are relatively minor things.

Maltese society deserves better than this. The independent media will no doubt repeat the mantra that the Labour Party is paranoid about the local media being generally anti Labour. But the facts remain what they always were: the Nationalist Party has the backing of a large section of the local media however much it underperforms.

This reality makes it more important for us in the Labour Party to communicate with Maltese families constantly and with whatever means are available to us. We are doing this in various ways because we believe that everyone, whichever party one supports, deserves to be told how certain decisions taken by the government of the day are affecting one’s life.

That is why the Labour Party today is the real voice of conscience for Maltese society.

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Dr Mangion is deputy leader of the Opposition.