A political party’s media house can never have a lot of credibility for the simple reason that its bias is more than obvious. But despite it being impossible for a political party newsroom to have full objectivity, it does not have to stoop to full propaganda tactics.
This is, unfortunately, what the Nationalist Party’s news media is doing – it has become an outlet where white becomes black and black becomes white, where the party leader is given a god-like status and unverified stories become the order of the day.
We can use what happened on Thursday as an example.
The PN’s daily newspaper came up with a full-front page ‘exclusive’ story which, it turned out, was not an exclusive at all. In-Nazzjon reported that two court marshals had been caught tampering with evidence, that a ‘new’ police investigation and magisterial inquiry had to be launched, and that the two persons were going to be arraigned. The story gave one the impression that all this was kept hidden by the authorities and that all this was being revealed for the first time.
When we checked out the story we quickly found out that these facts had in fact been revealed by the Justice Ministry, more than a year ago. The government had announced in April 2017 that two court marshals had been suspended and an inquiry was underway after the men were caught on the court’s CCTV system stealing some case files. We also found out that the pair was arraigned last month.
A simple search would have saved in-Nazzjon the embarrassment, but fact checking was never the forte for political newsrooms. Instead, stories are reported without any form of verification from a second source, or without comments being sought from those at the receiving end.
To make matters worse, PN leader Adrian Delia later held a press conference, based on the incorrect newspaper story.
Delia poured scorn over the government over this latest ‘revelation’ which, simply put translates into this: two court employees messed up, they were caught red handed, promptly investigated and suspended, and then arraigned.
To us this looks like the system is working just fine.
The PN thinks otherwise. It said this, along with two cases where drugs (cannabis and ecstasy) had disappeared from the court’s strong room, showed we cannot trust the courts to safeguard evidence. By the time the press conference was held it had already emerged that the cannabis had been found (it had only been mislabeled).
It had also emerged that the drugs had gone missing around 2004, under a PN government. This was conveniently left out of the press conference.
We thought it would end there, but it did not.
During the Net News bulletin in the evening we saw a journalist share a great ‘scoop’. After speaking briefly in front of the court building, this reporter decided that he would go to Owen Bonnici’s ministry to try and get a comment. Once there, he was told by staff that the minister was not in the building at the time. The journalist brazenly declared that the minister must have already gone home for the day – as if ministers only work inside their offices.
It is hard to understand what whole point of this news report was. It would have been different had the minister refused to comment, or slammed the door in the journalist’s face, but he simply was no there. So where is the story exactly?
This was not a one-off – it happens on a daily basis on both Net and One. It is said that both stations have sunk deeper into the abyss these past few years. But then again the PL has a comfortable advantage – a growing one it would seem – and it can afford letting its media standards fall, for the time being.
The PN cannot.
Its media cannot only cater for the diehard nationalists. It needs to try and convince those who stand in the middle, and these people will not be won over by propaganda straight out of Communist Russia. If it intends to stand a chance, the PN needs to do much, much better than this.