The protest began in the United States in the Covid-free days of 2016 and became a pre-match feature of football games and other sports around the world last year as the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets after the hideous murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minnesota.

Immediately, there were people of different political inclinations who expressed their opposition to players and sportsmen taking the knee, arguing it showed support for the political objectives of the BLM movement, however it was obvious at first that taking the knee was not a political gesture and most people rightly respected it.

However, after a whole season of players taking the knee in front of empty terraces I think the time has come for the football authorities, and those of other sports, to stop it. The message has been well and truly delivered and players should no longer have to be subjected to either applause or boos, depending on what they choose to do before the start of a game or event. As a matter of fact, it is sad to see sporting activities being diluted by politics and even religion. For example, why should a player have to be "seen" singing his country's national anthem if he does not feel like doing it publicly? Players have been victimised in the past for keeping their lips tight. And why should a player be allowed to resort to pre-match religious rituals when he could have done all that in the privacy of his team's dressing-room? It is time to rethink all this.

Not that this dilution is a new phenomenon. We all know the story of Benito Mussolini's not-so-diplomatic meddling for Italy to win the 1934 and 1938 World Cups and, in between, Hitler's palpable manipulation of the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Much nearer to us, we have also witnessed Western nations choosing to boycott international events in places with different ideological values, with the act being served in return.

While here in Malta we have recently been subjected to random stories of horrendous treatment of black persons by racist individuals, abetted by amused onlookers, who seem to get away with murder, the whole BLM scene has become a confusing dilemma to governments, political parties and authorities everywhere. In England, a Conservative MP has even gone as far as to call on fellow Tories to change their attitude towards people who take the knee as an anti-racism protest. His comments came after members of the England squad received massive racist abuse following the defeat, on penalties, to Italy in the Euro 2020 final.

Steve Baker, the MP making his square-peg-into-round-hole appeal, insisted with his Party's "Conservatives Against Racism, For Equality" group that "much as we can't be associated with calls to defund the police, we urgently need to challenge our own attitude to people taking a knee". He knew what he was talking about as both British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Home Secretary Priti Patel have themselves been accused of hypocrisy given some of their previous comments on the issue.

The truth, however, is that it has all become a tired issue. It is even no longer a political stance. In a world beset with the accumulating deaths of millions of people from Covid-19, such public gestures in routine sports activities need to have an expiry date, if permitted at all.

Whatever one's views, the message has indeed been delivered. It is whether it has been taken on and acted upon that would confirm its validity.

Muddy media waters

A recent column of mine in a Maltese language newspaper on how independent journalists around the world really are did cause some ripples on social media. It's part of the fun, of course, for those who have the time. But it has to be admitted the media is presently caught in muddy waters.

While the on-going torture of Julian Assange, whose only fault was to reveal American atrocities and war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, goes on to a scandalously disinterested international media, the sheer manipulation of global news outlets has soared to a gruesome degree. A most recent case in point was the coverage of events in Cuba where there have been both anti- and pro-government demonstrations.

Either erroneously or intentionally, Western news outlets showed a pro-government rally in Cuba but deemed it an opposition protest, while the most openly political of them all, CNN, opted for an image of a Miami (home to thousands of exiled Cubans) demonstration instead.

A picture, taken by an Associated Press photographer of a pro-government demonstration in Havana, was quickly making the rounds in the Western corporate press, seemingly gleeful the Caribbean country has been "engulfed" in massive unrest. The problem was, however, that all reproduced copies in newspapers like the Guardian, Fox News, the Financial Times, the New York Times and many others were captioned to say it was an anti-government protest! A copy-and-paste job in honour of free journalism, I guess.

With most media sources everywhere in the grip of billionaires, there seems to be no decent future for what we all want - a free media, even if not necessarily independent. Saved by social media? Hardly. The tech giants' grip is even harsher.

Fate and coincidence

Sometimes, fate and coincidence do play a mystifying game. I found it extremely uncanny that on the very day the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder inquiry, certainly not the cleanest and clearest ever to a neutral, was announced to have been completed, another investigative journalist, the Dutch crime reporter Peter R de Vries, died just nine days after he was shot in an Amsterdam street.

Whether you agree or not with all they say, when you have these infrequent bright lights you think are making up for the present-day media quagmire, you would be tempted to think there is still hope. Sadly, it doesn't look that likely when blood is spilt and lives are cruelly cut short.