For the years in between general elections political parties keep up the burden of running TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, and online and social media presence, to keep oiled and hot the engines of electioneering.
For all that time they suffocate political discourse by reducing everything, absolutely everything, to the zero-sum game of one side being necessarily and always right and consequently the other side being necessarily and always wrong.
On top of this iron curtain division, looms the cloud of public broadcasting that continues to be perceived wrongly and by too many as neutral just because it wears the trappings and gravitas of a state broadcaster. TVM is an unembarrassed ally of the Labour Party, even more insidious for the pretence of neutrality that it ambivalently puts on.
What little is left is where information that is independent of partisan interest is investigated, reported, and commented on.
For decades Labour had sought to discredit independent media. There are ideological prejudices that this is borne out of. In its socialist heritage it perceives as traitors and enemies of their cause all those who insist on existing outside it. There is an inherent dislike of independent capital, independent political opinion, independent education, and independent art, literature, and culture. Prejudice against independent media falls within the same range.
This hostility has waned and waxed over time. At the 2013 general election Joseph Muscat campaigned as the darling of independent capital and the picture boy of the independent media. The relationship with capital was preserved by inseverable bonds of corruption and mutual hidden interests. The relationship with the independent media grew sour as the reality of Muscat’s corrupt “roadmap” eclipsed the pre-electoral fiction of liberation from the PN’s wrongs.
Allied with the inevitable realities of limited resources, increasing costs, the shift away from conventional to electronic media, the popularisation and devaluation of information on social media, Labour undermined the independent media through various carrot and stick tactics.
It exploited their financial weaknesses by creating relatively cheap incentives to the media that would toe the line. Think Saviour Balzan.
It cut the intermediation of independent media by avoiding their questions and spending public money to directly address their audiences on Facebook without the annoying detail of having to answer journalists’ inquiries. Think Konrad Mizzi.
They suffocated criticism by indicting it as partisan, by misrepresenting it as deceitful, by exhausting it with court cases in and out of the country, and in one case alone by stepping back to allow their associates to kill her. Of course, you’re thinking of Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Right now, the independent media is what our citizens need to make a proper judgement at the next general election. Instead, thanks to the propaganda of the last several years, the independent media is too often ignored, left unseen, disbelieved by default, by many, many voters who will be deciding the country’s fate in 33 days.
In place of information, truthful, often painful, unvarnished by design, voters are left with propaganda deluded by the false notion of equality of arms (because both parties have a TV station) and the completely misguided idea that they are getting an objective picture painted by the public broadcaster and a limpid reflection of our social realities on the face of the still pool of social media.
There is no equality of arms between the media of the two parties. In some respects, they share interests which in being turned into shared silences are left out of the debate altogether.
The confrontation is unequal as well. One TV enjoys a wider viewership base that is happy to eat the absurdly North Korean rubbish it is fed than NET TV ever could or ever would. That only means that more people watch One TV than watch NET TV, there are more people who choose to believe One TV than there are people who choose to believe NET TV. And whether people are choosing to watch One TV or NET TV they are only watching one side of the story. If they choose to watch both, they get both sides of the story which is not to say they get the whole story.
Too many people believe that what social media tells them is true. There are people who thought Covid was a hoax and the people who died of it did that to fulfil Bill Gates’ narrative in his effort to take over the world. Would it surprise you to learn that there are people who think Silvio Schembri is a good Minister then? There are. They do. Because social media tells them. And they still haven’t figured out when social media is telling them that because Silvio Schembri is using their money to pay social media to say so.
As the range of the voice of independent media dwindles as far as the voices of the few still left working within it with whatever little money they are paid can reach, our democracy (which must depend on the free flow of information) is replaced by a tyranny with ballots.
Though the rituals of voting remain unchanged we must wonder with every election that goes by whether it will really be possible to ever have free and fair elections again.