Michelle Muscat, our very own Desert Queen of Hearts, has taken umbrage at the impudence of a newspaper report that claimed, basically, that one of Muscat’s best friends is exploiting prison inmates by engaging them as seamstresses, on a promise of payment (if you please, at below market rates), and then not paying them for months on end.
The newspaper was quoting the inmates. In the press conference, however, Muscat said that she wasn’t going to take the newspaper’s word for it. She wanted to hear it from the inmates directly.
Does that sound to you as though she was asking, however indirectly, the newspaper to identify its sources? It does to me. If so, this is the second time in a short while that someone associated with the Labour leadership has asked for journalists to reveal their sources.
It is an ominous sign for our democracy. Just like the news that Jason Azzopardi is being charged with defamation for doing his work as an Opposition spokesman.
The complex events which have unfolded in the past weeks have put a strain on our political system, right down to the core of democracy itself.
Preserving the fundamentals of democracy does not simply mean guaranteeing free and fair elections towards the creation of a just society. Very importantly, democracy supposedly serves to check unaccountable power and manipulation by the few at the expense of the many. This is where media plays an essential role.
John Keane, in his Media Decadence and Democracy (2013) speaks of “communicative abundance” in a multimedia-saturated society. The sheer volume of social media and a variety of communicative avenues may give us the false impression that the essential pillar of our democracy, media, is being guaranteed.
But Keane states that, “Media controversies and ‘-gate’ scandals remind us of a perennial problem facing monitory democracy: there is no shortage of organised efforts by the powerful to manipulate people beneath them. That is why the political dirty business of dragging power from the shadows and flinging it into the blazing halogen of publicity remains fundamentally important.”
This is also the reason why the latest manoeuvre related to the reversal of the Broadcasting Authority decision on the PN’s right of reply, after Reno Bugeja gave Konrad Mizzi a solo performance in the wake of the Panamagate scandal, is of serious concern.
Since then, the decision has been reversed yet again. The PN will get its right of reply after all. But only because the Opposition stood up to the Chairperson, Tanya Borg Cardona.
We didn’t need to get there. The attempt to muzzle us, in itself, is sinister. And if the attempt came from Borg Cardona herself, then matters are even more worrying.
What a sorry state we are in
Understanding the virtue of perseverance is a virtue in itself. You cannot achieve anything if you keep on quitting in everything. It is therefore admirable to see people put determination where their ambition is. However, persevering in a lie is far from admirable. It is deplorable.
Now that the PM’s Chief of Staff has apparently vanished, Alex Muscat, as deputy chief of Staff at the Office of the Prime Minister, put pen to paper to try and convince us that the tourist complex being developed in Zonqor is actually a “private, American-style, liberal arts university dedicated to higher education and research”, which, by the way, he still insists on calling a university even though the licence is for a higher education institute.
What a sorry state we are in! Alex Muscat lost his argument simply by revealing his place of work. Anything coming out of Castile at the moment is far from credible and is obviously there to divert people’s attention from the real issues concerning our country – corruption and good governance.
Trying once again to persevere in slamming the ‘AUM’ down people’s throat with a selling pitch that the project “involves an initial investment of …” and “will attract … and engage approximately …” simply doesn’t work anymore.