The recent saga involving yours truly, the Institute of Maltese Journalists and the Media Ethics Commission was a highly-charged affair, if not altogether lunatic. So many absurd situations developed and so many ironies occurred that it all turned out to be the definitive comedy of errors.

Although of course well-intentioned, I started it all when I jumped the gun and quickly, rather too quickly, published a commission decision on a case brought against me by the present news manager at PBS over a story in my weekly radio and TV scene page in a local daily in Maltese. The commission had not yet confirmed its decision and had not yet notified all the interested parties in the case, though this no man’s land situation eventually became superfluous as the details published remained unchanged. The decision, by the way, also included a commission demand for the gist of its decision to be published in the same space where the story had originally appeared.

In a nutshell, the commission decided the PBS manager concerned had absolutely no ethical leg to stand on and would have done well to spare them the misery of dealing with it. I had my knuckles rapped, though, and firmly reminded I should have contacted the claimant before running the story, which was otherwise fully confirmed and left uncontested.

I have to admit to a moment of unseemly conduct, more the product of journalistic haste than anything else. The details of the commission’s decision reached me via a fellow journalist who, rightly so, would not disclose his original source. Nor would I even think of revealing this colleague’s particulars. But this seems to have been the commission’s condition prior to submitting its collective resignation, however ironic and unethical that may sound to neutral ears.

The IGM was sadly caught in the crossfire. While the commission demanded to know who of its members had spilt the beans, the institute’s council, your columnist included, could hardly be expected to play ball. If there is something sacred for journalists all over the world it certainly is a commitment to keeping their contacts and whistle-blower details secret.

My colleagues at IGM did not deserve to be confronted in this ugly and hypocritical manner. It is why I finally decided to tender my resignation from the council and not out of some feeling of guilt that I had done anything wrong other than playing to the Stones’ famous hit, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. The institute had nothing to do with the case and should not have been treated in this manner, so with my going away I hoped it would be able to start a new chapter, seek the appointment of a new, autonomous commission and get on with the business of representing Maltese journalists who do have their differences and who do have chips on their shoulders, but would certainly do without blackmail tactics.

The irony of it all is that the commission as it was set up before it chose to call it a day over something it could hardly control, let alone dictate, was certainly most trustworthy and qualified. With a chairman who had picked up a myriad gauntlets in the fields of journalism and broadcasting and a membership that likewise has seen it all, done it all and, well, almost conquered it all, the commission promised a new, much-needed beginning in national media ethics.

Its first decisions pinpointed to this new, fast-lane approach to ethical issues, and the case against me was one of them. Its message was loud and clear: stop wasting everybody’s time and if there are details you want to correct, just do so with whoever is directly responsible. In this particular case, all the PBS manager had to do was get in touch (yeah, I know, that’s ironic too, I should have got in touch even earlier), explain his objection to that very small, almost insignificant part of the “story” and out with the marching music.

I fail to understand why journalists have to be this so sensitive with each other on the local front. Not that journalists anywhere else in the world don’t have these marshmallow moods too, but somehow they manage to deal with them on a professional level, i.e. the newspaper or station involved. Going to court or glorifying one’s objection or assumed offence by having it referred to a bigger authority, however, is a rarity.

Even in the worst of times in the UK, the mid-seventies, when the then-vibrant “Private Eye” magazine was making a bazooka event of every journalist who objected to its no-holds-barred approach to everyday journalism, the protagonists often simply opted to let off steam with a simple paragraph or a two-minuter on radio and TV, and everything was soon right again with the world, except for the bizarre story involving the magazine’s then editor Richard Ingrams and the late millionaire food tycoon Jimmy Goldsmith, his lawyers and some sycophantic members of the media he had tempted into his camp.

Here we tend to dramatise and over-react. There have been magistrates and judges in the past who rightly showed their exasperation at the number of libel cases they have had to deal with over the years, many of which even involved journalists taking on journalists. It is exactly why today we have the IGM and the Journalists’ Committee (as in the case of bands, saints and political clubs we have to have two, of course) and why the creation of a Press (Media) Ethics Commission was rightly felt to be so imperative.

In a career that has now spanned a good 40-plus years, I was only forced into taking libel action once, a case which I won hands down, and there has never been one instituted against me. The recent overblown ethics affair was also my first, and I won that too. It is, perhaps, why we’ve had all the recent fireworks.