Who needs Russia Today when we have Television Malta?

I was caught out of step with the free speech community in the last few days. I thought banning Russia Today from Western screens was frankly a good idea. They are spreading lies masked as news and people who prefer the lies resort to what RT reports as evidence of what they imagine. That’s just war using cameras and microphones as weapons.

Free speech campaigners think differently. Let them say their lies, campaigners say. You don’t fight lies by shutting up the liars. You fight them by saying the truth instead.

I’m not sure about this one. Russia has just made it illegal to report on its armies’ activities in any way differently than the official story handed down by the government, on pain of imprisonment for 15 years. Journalists who want to report the truth have been criminalised and effectively silenced. And we’re supposed to get Russia’s point of view on the back of the propaganda fed to us by an aggressive, criminal regime.

This piece wasn’t meant to be so philosophical.

Russia Today and Russian propaganda glossed over the fact that the Russian army yesterday started a fire after shelling Europe’s largest nuclear power station bringing us closer to a repeat of the Chernobyl disaster, or something unimaginably worse than that, than we’ve ever been.

You’d have to be a reporter working at the service of the Russian regime to deny your audience the knowledge of what happened yesterday on the war front.

Or you’d have to be Norma Saliba of TVM. The top story on yesterday’s 8 pm news on national TV was a visit by Minister Myriam Dalli to a peanut packaging factory. The factory, in business for donkey’s years, is moving to a slightly larger building. And the Minister went to see the old factory because the new factory is still a twinkle in its owner’s eye.

It’s reassuring to know that if an invisible cloud of radiation slowly makes its way towards us, we’ll have salted peanuts blessed by Myriam Dalli to ward off the boredom. Viva l-Lejber, even after the apocalypse.

If you’re tempted to remark that all this is “unreal”, don’t. This is worse than unreal. This is real.