You can sing this week’s title to Dylan’s famous “I pity the poor immigrant”, if you like. It was prompted by this paper’s pathetic treatment of nearly six months of dedicated work by a Labour-appointed commission entrusted with the submission of a code of ethics for the party’s media. I am sure my editor won’t have me quartered for saying so, but the caption story run last week to cover the official presentation of the commission’s final report was nothing more than a hapless attempt at trying to play people against people.

The occasion certainly deserved a lot better than that. After all, being presented to Joseph Muscat was a genuine and certainly welcome opportunity for the Labour media to voluntarily enter a new, more respectable phase, one that would deserve to be adopted by the rest of the political media, including those happily playing their fictitious apolitical role. A national and professional consensus on what is being proposed in that code of ethics would serve the nation well, as long as it honestly seeks to come out of the muck of recent history.

For too many decades, our historian has been fed hopelessly diluted information to interpret in his work. It is why our history books leave so much to be desired. When we have always needed historians with facts, we have mostly had historians with opinions, more often than not based on personal experiences, obvious ambitions and blatant prejudices.

Some future historian, I hope, will one day survey this curious time of ours with the required ironic detachment. He is to be envied, for a rare harvest awaits him, always assuming, of course, that we do not destroy all our records and ourselves. Even if the records survive, they will, in any case, be difficult to

dicipher.

The accumulation of lies and slanted information over the past 50 years is vast, as are the contradictory conclusions and conflicting evidence. How will the poor historian ever disentangle it all? He may have to consult some of the surviving contemporaries or their successors, if any, and the most predictable reply is bound to be “everything was true, except the facts.”

Will this have to be the epitaph of our generation? While one hopes not, it is true to say that never have so many facts been accumulated and never have such ingenious and efficacious means of propagating them far and wide been devised, but only to weave a great web of deception.

I speak from a privileged standpoint. Having run the gauntlet right from the days of being a daily newspaper hack to broadcast news management, I would not hesitate to herald the new awareness and, in so doing, sparing more misery to our future historian. It is why I gladly accepted to form part of Labour’s Ethics Commission whose work, I dare say, has but two destinies: either it is going to be upheld and even improved upon by a Maltese media belatedly aware of the public hunger for fairness and professionalism, or it is going to be lost in the political quicksand that, alas, has claimed many previous well-meant attempts.

If we are to reduce such exercises merely to more idle tinkering with names and innuendos, as last week’s caption writer of The Malta Independent on Sunday unhappily chose to do, and which other sectors of the English language print media continue to do, then it will have been all in vain. Indeed, one can say there were some strange bedfellows in that commission, but will it shock anyone if I say I had rarely had such pleasure working in so many other committees and commissions in the past?

I know last week’s caption story was meant to somehow interpret the body language involved, particularly in the case of Dr Toni Abela, the MLP deputy leader, and Peppi Azzopardi, the presenter of what has undoubtedly been the most popular TV chat show ever on Maltese television. But Peppi and yours truly too cannot be said to have been, at least of late, on very amicable terms in the public eye, but work together we did, and most satisfactorily, with the rest of the commission chaired by Malta’s unbending media lady, Carmen Sammut.

It may be significant, however, for people who may want to be bothered to know, that when Joseph Muscat actually appointed both of us on the commission last June, Peppi and I were caught in a newspaper wrangle that was certainly not lost for nice words. The Labour leader was of course highly aware of this, but when he asked me whether I would be comfortable working with Peppi Azzopardi, I quickly said of course. It later transpired that the same live sketch was repeated when Joseph Muscat approached Peppi over the possibility of working with me on the commission, as Peppi’s reply was exactly like mine.

The future historian will have to deal with such situations when he confronts the mysterious accumulation of facts and events of the past half-century. Of course I do not in any way refer to this little exchange of ours, but obviously to the whole media quagmire that we have all, willingly or not, been engulfed in by way of protecting, promoting, buying and selling the socio-political ideas on a protracting national agenda.

I pity the poor historian, though. He will not just have to contend with the media and the politicians, but also with the historians who so far have sadly seemed happy to be part of the whole circus.