It happens every time a general election looms. Suddenly, the Maltese media starts losing its head, dancing to different tunes and more or less acting strangely and generally behaving badly. It is a situation that is not only boring and hopelessly predictable, but, worse still, horribly harmful to both the profession and those – of several generations – who practise it.

You can only hate it, even if you inevitably find yourself sucked into it and actually participating. Journalists and broadcasters you would often find willingly and normally working together despite their diverse ideological views, change almost overnight into blinkered individuals seeking to score a good one against each other.

Isn’t that all too human a trait, one would rightly ask. It certainly is and journalists and broadcasters all over the world will neither be taken for aliens from outer space nor for angels and demons one would or could categorise and shelve as per season. The difference here is the complete immersion in partisan positions in different ways and by different means.

It is safe to proclaim there is not a single journalist or broadcaster anywhere on these islands who can claim to be apolitical, let alone independent. Fair yes, realistic certainly, but in a minuscule society that thrives on politics with both a small p and a big p, there is no escaping the “original sin” we tend to be born with, and that, I hasten to add, has absolutely nothing to do with religion, catechism or a pocketful of indulgences to be gained.

In this fair land, the accepted assumption is that you are either red or blue, Labour or Nationalist, progressive or conservative, even the hitherto ineffective greens get to be analysed and eventually shown for what they really are, have been and will be in this polarised condition of an island that screams to be seen as an independent and sovereign state when it acts like a remote, Mafia-run Sicilian village.

But for the media and media people to fall so easily and habitually into the old trap is a source of professional wonder. Why do we have to be such obvious dummies as to let our political views, to which we are indeed entitled in a free country, become a bone of contention at a time when we should be showing more solidarity and bonhomie?

I am not naively dealing with riddles, but with facts. Anyone who has a problem perceiving the already soaring political temperature on newspapers, radio, TV and the new media must be either in a trance or simply prefers to see the tree and not the forest. The political hounds are out, and with them the journalists and broadcasters who want to share the hunt and the spoils.

The worst perpetrators are those who conveniently fire pot-shots from behind anonymous electronic walls, the trigger-happy bloggers who the academics and their institutions want us to accept as journalists. The argument is: today everyone is a journalist! Anyone who scribbles a few hate words on some newspaper or personal blog feels they are entitled to say that they are journalists.

And, of course: today everyone is a broadcaster! Anyone who finds himself or herself in front of even the most pitiful microphone and a pea-sized camera, even if it is just to Skype friends and lovers at some other end, feels entitled to say he or she belongs to the profession.

The painful aspect of the whole sorry situation is that seasoned journalists and broadcasters, people who have been through the whole hog and should know better, are also caught in the political snare. Blogs, radio and TV airtime and newspaper space are rightly there to be used for serious and well-meaning discussion, not mud-slinging and character assassination. There is no harm in showing we disagree, and that is actually something beautiful and to be appreciated, it is how we are going about it that really disturbs me.

I am no candidate for sainthood, but sadly we do have those sangorgprecas in the media who try to project divinity when they really are selling sharpened hatchets and axes. There should be no problem discussing different ideas and methods and no inhibitions when analysing standpoints and views, but to do all this in an atmosphere of sheer madness, even inside and outside the Law Courts with complete disregard for decency and respect for personal privacy, is tantamount to nothing else but newsprint guerrilla warfare.

Instead of keeping up this political ganging business from now right up to polling day, we should be concentrating on turning the whole political debate into a serious and reassuring exercise, wrath into dialogue and vilification tactics into a healthy, intellectual exchange. Have we really reached a point of no return and there can be no hope the Maltese media, for once in its existence since the time of the French occupation, can be seen to show it has an intelligent mind of its own and is willing to be seen and perceived as such?

The politicians have a role to play here. There is a new and fresh-looking generation of politicians taking over in Malta and Gozo. I believe they honestly want to change things. It is being seen and felt on both sides of the political fence. It now depends entirely on them whether things will take the same old route of yesteryear in reducing politics to mere insults and parochial pique, or really start a new chapter wherein every pillar of society, including the media, has a say in the everyday running of the country.

So far the going hasn’t been so good. We have had hopeful glimpses of the new chapter, but this cannot be written by those peopling one side of the fence only. This is what those of us in the real media, new or not, must explain and clamour for.

At least if we don’t want to go on hating it, our fingers dug deep in the pie.