Andrew Azzopardi lectures in the university’s Department of Youth and Community Studies and his opinion is sometimes sought by journalists because he hosts a radio show and writes a blog and therefore falls into the category of social commentator.
Yesterday, he gave his opinion to The Times on the matter of privacy of public figures. That opinion makes so little sense that it has inspired this column. Azzopardi claims that there is no public interest justification for reporting on the criminal prosecution of a politician “over a personal matter”.
“My take on this one is as clear as crystal, no, and I am adamant on this one. It is definitely not up to anyone to dig into people’s life, be it journalists, opinion leaders, bloggers or anyone else,” he wrote. “It will only take a different dimension in exceptional circumstances when an individual’s behaviour can be clearly linked with his/her public duties and until that is unambiguous we are in duty bound by discretion and unadulterated prudence.”
Dr Azzopardi’s thinking is confused in the extreme, not least because he starts out by referring to politicians and then widens his justification to “people”. No sane person would suggest that the press have a right or duty to dig into the private lives of ‘people’. The private lives of private people, for a start, are protected by law. The law does not permit you to report even cast-iron facts about private persons, unless they have done or said something to temporarily divest them of their right to privacy, like commit a crime, face police prosecution for a crime, or enter the forum of public debate with their views and opinions, seeking to be heard.
What we are talking about here is politicians, and Andrew Azzopardi is disingenuous, to categorise them simply as ‘people’, like the grocer or the woman next door. Politicians are not just public figures, but they are a special class of public figure which lays them open to even greater scrutiny than ordinary public figures. This for the very obvious reason, though it is clearly not obvious to at least one lecturer at the University of Malta, that politicians ask for our votes and demand that we allow them to represent us in parliament or council. This means that we have to know exactly who and what they are and what they are doing (in Maltese – ‘xi jsarfu’).
I’m going to bring up the subject of Robert Musumeci yet again, because it is the perfect example of just why electors should be told what the people who ask for their votes have been up to or are up to at present. When Musumeci was presented to electors on the Nationalist Party ticket in 2008, it was as a decent man who had just started a family with the nice young fellow architect to whom he was married. A few of us knew that he was at that time conducting an adulterous affair with a married magistrate, without the knowledge of either her husband or his wife, and that the magistrate, to confound matters still further, was and still is much enamoured of the Labour Party, a situation which was likely to create divided or at least confused political loyalties.
But the electorate did not know this. All they saw was a fresh youngish candidate with a lovely wife and a baby. Fortunately, not enough people voted for him to make him a member of parliament. But imagine if they had done so, and then Musumeci had done what he did just a few months later, leaving his wife and baby to set up home with the magistrate in question, who also left her husband for the purpose. Those who voted for him would have felt angry, betrayed and cheated. They would have felt like those who voted for Cyrus Engerer are feeling now.
For it is to the defence of Cyrus Engerer that Andrew Azzopardi, senior lecturer at the University of Malta, has sprung. He thinks that Engerer should be able to raid his ex-lover’s computer for compromising sex pictures, email them to his ex-lover’s boss and workplace colleagues in an attempt at getting him sacked or at least into some kind of trouble, face prosecution for doing so, and still remain unmolested by the press. The press, Azzopardi believes, should protect people in Engerer’s position from intrusion by the curious public.
God knows why The Times should ask a lecturer in youth and community studies for his views on these matters, instead of a lecturer in, say, journalism and media. Then they might have got the answer that the press is there to serve its readers (and radio and TV their listeners or viewers) and not to protect politicians from the consequences of their own daft or malicious behaviour.
Do electors have the right to know that a man who has asked them for their votes, who has already taken those votes to represent them on a council, who is slated to ask them to allow him to represent them in parliament in 2013, is facing criminal prosecution?
Yes, of course they do. This is so obvious that it is beyond dispute.
Do electors have the right to know that the man who stands before them asking for their votes is the sort who is capable of trying to exact revenge on a lover by getting him sacked from his place of work (for what other motivation could there be in sending his boss crude photographs of him engaged in strenuous and acrobatic sex with another man)?
Yes, of course they do, and this should be beyond question but is clearly not to people like Andrew Azzopardi who appear to believe that politicians have a right to present a false front to electors and that the press is obliged to protect those politicians in their presentation of that false front.
That Azzopardi’s thinking should be so muddled is worrying. He is unable to distinguish between what is truly private – a row between a politician and his wife, for example, on which the press has absolutely no right to intrude because there is no public-interest justification – and a serious act of malice which is open to criminal prosecution and which reveals most unsavoury facets of a politician’s character, as with the Cyrus Engerer case.
Azzopardi appears to operate under the delusion that when sex is involved, the issue is automatically private. This is absolutely not so. Sex is involved in the Cyrus Engerer case, but the public-interest argument has nothing to do with the sex. We knew Cyrus Engerer has sex with men and we still voted for him because we think that’s fine.
The real point at issue is the criminal malice and the frighteningly poor judgement, not the sex, and those are definitely and without question attributes which are directly relevant to his political life. They are relevant because this matter tells us a great deal about how Engerer takes decisions. People do not have one set of decision-making skills for their private life and another set of decision-making skills for their public life. It is all of a piece, as his decision to swing to Labour overnight has shown.
People like Andrew Azzopardi might live in a world where it is OK or just about understandable to try to get your lover sacked because he has dumped you, but fortunately, most of us don’t. And if those people have asked us to vote for them, then we demand to know it.