Where J’accuse compares the clean up for the Papal visit to the setting up of a Potemkin village in Imperial Russia.
If we were to present all the bar and village chat in Malta as a twitter-like presentation, I have no doubt that Benedict XVI’s visit would be among the most tagged threads of discussion. Benedict would be right up there next to newroads and maltafacelift, together with all the sarcastic comments about how we only get an aesthetic makeover whenever a pezzonovante (bigwig) is coming to town. Even good old Ronan Keating managed to see the joke about it last week.
Towards the end of the 18th century, the Tsarina’s minister, Grigory Potyomkin, is purported to have erected hollow facades of villages along the desolate banks of the river Dnieper on the occasion of Catherine the Great’s visit to the latest of Russian imperial conquests. Potyomkin wanted to convince the Tsarina that the new conquests were valuable and so erected these fake villages as an aesthetic enhancement.
Historians disagree as to whether this story is true or not, but the name Potemkin Villages has stuck to other modern uses where artificial constructions were used to give visitors (often dignitaries) a distorted impression of the place they were visiting. The Nazi’s had Theresienstadt concentration camp – the Paradise Ghetto prepared for the Red Cross visitors, while more recently both Beijing’s Olympic village and South Africa’s World Cup infrastructures have been described as Potemkin Villages – oases of beauty that do not reflect the crumbling structures in the rest of the country.
In our very own version of a Potemkin Island, Benedict XVI will be wheeled through a sanitised route of resurfaced roads, repainted furnishings and – if rumour has it right – roundabouts cleansed of any suggestive sculptures. Should His Holiness be lucky enough, the combined efforts of Marsa and Delimara power stations might hold out long enough throughout his visit and the full Potemkin Picture of this nation of ours will remain forever engraved on his memory.
There is a sad note about all this. Remember CHOGM? It stops being funny after a while. What was previously the odd quip about being lackeys to foreigners begins to sound more and more like the truth – we live in a country that will only hold together for a few seconds while the foreign dignitary traipses around – then its back to holey (sic) chaos.
The Potemkin Courts
The term Potemkin Village has often been adopted by dissenting judges in their opinion when they refer to the majority decision. They describe the majority decision as being one that was not based on sound legal reasoning but on the expediency of avoiding a difficult decision. The decision becomes a figurative Potemkin Village – shortcuts parading as valid legal argumentation. This week we had Lou Bondi appealing to the dissenting BA members to speak out – to describe the BA’s decision as a potemkin village.
The Broadcasting Authority had fined Public Broadcasting Services around €1,400 because Where’s Everybody’s programme Bondiplus broke the BA’s rules on political impartiality in its edition of 8 March. What happened? Bondi chose the highly investigative topic of “Two Years of Government” for his programme. His chosen subject was to be the highlights and lowdowns of the first two years of this legislature in the company of Deputy Prime Minister Tonio Borg* (only guest). This Maoist style of looking back at governmental achievements on anniversaries is nowadays common in Western nations, including the US and the UK – nothing strange in that.
As far as J’accuse is concerned, there is also nothing strange in the fact that Bondi’s editorial line included selecting one minister from the government and no other personality – be it a member of the Opposition or a columnist/commentator. It’s WE’s show and they can choose to make it as boringly and backside-lickingly bland as a PLPN electoral spot.
What concerned the BA was the apparent bias towards government because “In the opinion of the authority, these features [about the government] were nothing other than promotion of government activity, with no effort having been made at critical analysis.” The BA’s measure of justice and equity in the public media is actually a set of rules framed to guarantee balance for the main political parties. A PLPN balance.
The BA is not really finding Lou guilty of shoddy journalism; it is finding Lou guilty of lack of balance. For the BA, no effort at critical analysis means no Opposition voice in the programme. Had Lou Bondi opted to have, let’s say, Evarist Bartolo, for a cameo Opposition appearance all would be good for the BA. Nothing would change on a journalistic level of course – the blood has been spilled and journalism is long dead.
The BA verdict as to what is wrong with Bondiplus programmes has nothing professional about it. It is just another measure in the playground of mediocre partisan bigotry – the rules governing broadcasting are an insult to the citizen and his intelligence. An intelligent viewer does not need nanny BA to tell him that the 8 March programme by Lou Bondi is politically biased. He does not even need to be protected from that bias – because, like every single one of his presumed 160,000 viewers, he should already know what to expect.
Not only do the rules not protect the citi-zen but they will also fine him indirectly for their violation. Bondi breaks the sorry rules and the BA slaps a fine on PBS – PUBLIC Broadcasting Services. Who keeps the PBS up and running? PLPN? Surely not, they have their own failing ventures to see to – and probably would come up with some sort of agreement to square their fines just like they do for their libels.
The BA is a farce because its purpose is ill-conceived. The Institute of Journalists (IMG) is close to being one big joke. This month expect more winners of the Journalism Awards – trophies given out to SELF-NOMINATED candidates with a jury composed of people who are not lifting one finger to improve the lot of a dead profession on the island.
Meanwhile, angry Lou is gunning to go all the way to the Constitutional Court in order to win his constitutional right to present a shoddy programme. We’re behind him on that one – so long as he’s not using our money.
The ‘Battleship Potemkin’
Sergei Eisenstein’s film about the mutiny on the Potemkin battleship was filmed in 1925 and hailed as the best film of all time in 1958 at the Brussels World Fair. The silent film was a monumental propagandistic effort from start to finish. One bit of propaganda that seems to be rebounding in Prime Minister Gonzi’s face on an annual basis is the hunting issue. On the one hand are the purists who felt vindicated that EU membership would bring an end to the horrible sport, and on the other are the hunters who had been convinced by the PN’s propagandistic pre-accession guarantees that nothing would change on the hunting front.
Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and circus owner P.T. Barnum have all been attributed the quote. Bob Marley sang it wonderfully in Get Up Stand Up and in a way it’s all about the Potemkin principle… our leaders visiting the Middle East and China would do well to bear it in mind wherever they go. Remember: you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
www.akkuza.com has been looking at some -isms and -skisms. Come join our virtual potemkin community.
This article and accompanying Bertoon appeared in today’s edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday.
* The original article as submitted (and as appeared in the Malta Independent on Sunday) erroneously reported Minister Tonio Fenech as the only guest.
An interview with an exemplary Soviet Farmer’s Collective
And the Happy Kazak Wheat Farmers
4 replies on “The Potemkin Nation”
One of these days they should run the tagline that akkuza.com is now big in recycling as blog posts become newspaper articles which become blog posts. Too busy?
Not really. It’s more of a case of different audiences. Sometimes a blogpost is good enough to be repeated in the weekend article. Think of blogposts as thoughts appearing during the week. Think of the article as a roundup of those thoughts. What you call recycle I call stressing the point on a different medium. Just because the article is reproduced in the blog it does not make it any less of an article does it?
Goodnight (and good luck)
I had posted a comment on the other version of this article, but it got lost amongst the sea of posts.
I’d just like to reiterate my original point – it’s all well and good to say “It’s Where’s Everybody’s program, so they can be as arse-lickingly biased as they like”, but don’t forget that it is the national broadcaster’s airtime that they are using – the same broadcaster that is financed by the taxpayer.
There is, I believe, a moral obligation for the national broadcaster to avoid thinly-veiled propaganda and jingoistic broadcasts.
Arguing that “an intelligent viewer does not need nanny BA to tell him that the 8 March programme by Lou Bondi is politically biased” might suffice if Bondiplus was broadcast on a private station. But on the national broadcasting station, that exoneration just doesn’t cut it.
At the heart of it all, I have no idea how someone with Mr Bondi’s openly partisan views is allowed to run a current affairs program on TVM. At the very least, he ought to have the journalistic integrity to approach openly political programs with kid gloves.
The thing is Fanon that we have a number of different issues here. We could argue whether and how far a state must interfere in the content of public broadcasting. The Broadcasting Act does supposedly create a framework to regulate content in the manner you are speaking. It’s the eternal question for the various BBC, Raiuno, France1 programming.
The way PBS farms out its content to WE or other submitters of tenders, the most we can expect is a contractual obligation for content. That is not my issue here though. I am not really interested in the commercial vs educational debate at this point.
I am more interested in what kicks off the BA’s monitoring feelers. Fausto calls it a lack of definition of impartiality – I think it is sufficiently defined through purposive interpretation – the law refers sufficiently to the term so as to not ignore it and couches it within contexts that are interpretable.
The BA will move for impartiality and incidentally Bondi’s rights ARE guaranteed at law (including Fair trial). Simply because BA did not follow it with through with a proper hearing does not mean that Bondi cannot use that to challenge it. He has not exactly been slapped into a prison with bread and water and is still fully capable of challenging the decision.
What matters is that the BA will look into (and interpret) “partiality” and will not look into “quality” and “investigative analysis”. You can give them all the regulation you like but in the end they will bark where their masters like it best – the par condicio hypocrisy. And Lou, I repeat, is quite happy to play along and challenge within this framework because in the long run he is the one-eyed man in this particular blind scenario.
I wouldn’t even go so far as to think of Bondi as openly partisan. He has a tired style replete with old reference points and he is oblivious to his own double standards. It may be lazy journalism resulting from complacency … whatever it is, I think that what you need here is not more regulation of content but proper perspective of what kind of journalism we want to have – and in this case our only hope would be the marketplace and not the regulating halls.
But that would be reopening the education vs commercial scenario.
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