From Mr J. Cachia
Your editorial “Is it just moonshine?” of Sunday 16 September leaves little doubt that your newspaper is slowly, but surely, joining the Nationalist government’s damage control brigade.
Worse than this, it strengthens the view shared by many that with this new editorial slant, The Malta Independent on Sunday is being reduced to an English language version of the Nationalist Party’s written media.
I came to this conclusion on the basis of two previous extremely partisan and politically loaded contributions that appeared in your newspaper in recent weeks.
In your edition of 26 August you allowed the publication of one of the most obnoxious personal attacks against Dr Alfred Sant in the vitriolic opinion piece “Growing old gracelessly” written by your regular correspondent Daphne Caruana Galizia. This was an article that even die-hard Nationalists found very crude, objectionable and far beyond the limits of journalistic decency.
On Sunday 2 September you published, under your signature, a list with the names of people appointed chairpersons to government boards and corporations by the 1996 Labour government.
Was it by strange coincidence that this list appeared on the same day that another English language Sunday paper carried an interview with Joe Saliba, general secretary of the Nationalist Party?
During the course of his interview with MaltaToday, Mr Saliba replied to a particular question “… by presenting a list of 23 public officials who were changed when Labour was elected in 1996”.
This was more or less the number of names on your list. The least one would expect from an unbiased and objective journalist is a balanced article giving also a list of Nationalist politicians or activists who today occupy key positions, from the presidency of the Republic down to the most insignificant of government boards.
The cherry on the cake came with the editorial of Sunday 16 September. In a very weak attempt to reply to a sensible and down to earth leader in The Times of Saturday 15, your editorial tried to shore up some credibility to a Nationalist government, which will go down in history for its miserable record of unfulfilled or delayed projects.
I shall not bore your readers to tears with a long list of such projects, perhaps you, or one of your journalists, can do that one day to prove your objectivity.
You remarked that the Grand Harbour plan announced with such pomp and circumstance by the Nationalist government “has been met by a sea of apathy submerged in an ocean of doubts and undermined by snide remarks”. How could it be otherwise?
This project has been launched by a stale 20-year-old government who could not even manage to meet the deadlines on the Merchants Street embellishment project. It is also the same government who took 17 years to build a hospital, a feat meriting a shameful entry in the Guinness Book of Records.
The reference to the Malta Labour Party and its plans for the regeneration of the Grand Harbour region in your editorial comment is most unfair. You must be aware that the Labour Party is in a process of consultation with all the localities and organizations in the area and that it will publish its plan when this phase is concluded.
In your negative assessment you bring Labour’s process down to a photo-op without the slightest respect for the interlocutors who are being heard by the Labour Party.
Il-Mument could not have done better.
Josef Cachia
HAMRUN