When I was growing up, the press did not reflect the reality of life in Malta. You got more news through the bushfire telegraph than you did through the newspapers. And it goes without saying that you got no news at all through the television and radio, because there was just the one of each and they were tightly controlled by the government. There was so much going on in business, in politics, in corruption, in weird networking, in violence, in constant anxiety, in difficulties provisioning for even the most simple meals, in finding work, in doing work – and yet the newspapers were literally incapable of reflecting this.

Or perhaps they were unwilling, or both of those things. The result, ultimate, was that the disastrous Labour government stayed in power long than it should have because the press was not fighting the battles it should have been. But worse than that is the fact that there is no written, printed, contemporary record of the reality of life back then. There were no newspapers stories that conveyed the facts and the reality. And this allowed Joseph Muscat and his party to rewrite those terrible years as The Golden Years of Labour. It has also permitted certain individuals who lived through those years, and who should know better, to develop a sort of selective dementia which allowed them to celebrate Dom Mintoff, the architect of that disaster, when he died three and a half years ago. And newer generations, of course, have just wondered what all the fuss was about. If they could be bothered to go through the newspaper archives, they will find little or nothing of what people like me talk about.

I bring this up now because I have the strangest sensation that it’s happening again: newspapers are not reflecting actual reality. Sometimes, when we journalists are in it up to our necks, we forget that the stories on the page have to be seen in isolation, detached from the backstory and context that lives in our minds. We have to ask ourselves: if somebody were to read this piece five, 10, 15, 20 years down the line, without knowing the context, will the story give a sense of what is really happening? Will the overall coverage in the newspaper do that?

Well, I don’t know about that. I’m trying to work out whether the picture that is building up in the public’s mind – and we know it is, because people are talking – is different to the picture building up in the newspapers. Right now, the picture building up in the public’s mind is that of Joseph Muscat and Konrad Mizzi, thick as thieves, running every government deal together and now planning on taking control of the Labour Party too. But is this picture emerging clearly in the newspapers?

Last week, the tight team went to the Gulf, attended by a veritable harem of communications staff which included, lest my noun be considered sexist, Kurt Farrugia himself. They did not take any press with them (too inconvenient), but issued turgid and controlled press releases through the Department of Information, which is in the Prime Minister’s portfolio. These press releases and controlled stories were duly and dutifully reported verbatim in the press. Why? Are newspapers becoming notice-boards for Department of Information press releases once more? This is wrong. The more the government tries to control and hide information, the more the press should chase it, while refusing to publish those government press releases in the form in which they are sent out.

What we have now is a situation in which, because government ministers, the prime minister and his entourage are not accessible to the press, and release information only centrally through the Department of Information and not even through individual ministries as used to happen under the Nationalists, journalists are simply giving up and not bothering. Before 2013, if you received a ministerial press release – and it always came directly from the ministry and not from the DOI – you would ring the minister or his communications coordinator and ask any questions you needed to ask about it. Now, the press release comes through the DOI and if you ring the minister or his coordinator, you generally draw a blank or get put off.

There are a hundred questions that need to be asked about Joseph Muscat’s and Konrad Mizzi’s trip to the Gulf, but the chances that they will be asked are rapidly devolving to nought. By repeatedly stonewalling press questions, the government has created a psychological situation in which journalists don’t bother to ask.

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