It might be old news by now – I know, blogging has not been regular to put it mildly – but the visit by Le Iene to Malta still merits some attention and this for a number of reasons. I am an irregular follower of the program because the Mediaset channels are not so easily available in Luxembourg but I do find the idea behind the show (for it is a show) interesting and worthy of encouragement. Inspired by Tarantino’s heroes in Reservoir Dogs Le Iene go about town doing some dirty investigative works on projects that they choose to follow. These are supposedly bits of news and scoops that the mainstream media has either shied away from naturally or it deals with them with a self-imposed omerta’. It helps to bear in mind that the manner in which a matter or issue is presented by Le Iene is the result of heavy editing – the kind of editing in which the findings that they set out to ascertain play a heavy part.
It’s all A.O.K when the troupe sets out on a mission to uncover waste of public funds in Italy – I remember a particularly cutting service about a fully equipped hospital built in Puglia that simply never opened its doors. It even had operating theatres complete with machinery. The problem is that Le Iene’s stories can be heavily one-sided… and the Malta piece was definitely one of those cases. Having been told by an Italian entrepreneur that “il governo maltese” is refusing to pay some hard-earned cash and that as a result of this a number of “lavoratori” risk being put on the dole, Le Iene saw your typical plot unfold. Here was the opptorunity to play big balls with the big balls in a neighbouring country. The anti-capitalist, anti-big government poor poor unpaid workers story was their type of fodder – better still if some nationalistic element could be thrown into the fold free of charge.
When you’re dealing with a store like this, they’re insured up the ass. They’re not supposed to give you any resistance whatsoever. If you get a customer, or an employee, who thinks he’s Charles Bronson, take the butt of your gun and smash their nose in. Everybody jumps. He falls down screaming, blood squirts out of his nose, nobody says fucking shit after that. You might get some bitch talk shit to you, but give her a look like you’re gonna smash her face next, watch her shut the fuck up. Now if it’s a manager, that’s a different story. Managers know better than to fuck around, so if you get one that’s giving you static, he probably thinks he’s a real cowboy, so you gotta break that son of a bitch in two. If you wanna know something and he won’t tell you, cut off one of his fingers. The little one. Then tell him his thumb’s next. After that he’ll tell you if he wears ladies underwear. … I’m hungry. Let’s get a taco. (Harvey Keitel as Mr. White in Reservoir Dogs).
They don’t cut off anybody’s fingers on the Italian show. They do a lot of sticking in the middle with you though. As in they turn up unannounced, they shove a microphone (not a gun) into your face, feed you the very loaded question and then sit back and watch you squirm. It’s normally a done deal. Faced with the high percentage of corrupt politicians and criminal involvement in Italy the grass is never missing from their usual pastures. It sounded like it would be more of the same when we heard Filiberti plead his case before Piano’s ostentatiously magnificent supertecture. 3 million euro of debts and no payments since the change of government. Hold up. “Since the change of government”? Why would an Italian businessman desperate to get his money back risk rubbing the current government the wrong way by adding the partisan element? Let’s face it he had no reason at all to do so. But he did.
Let me be clear. I now speak with the benefit of hindsight and having seen the video released by (I believe) Zrinzo Azzopardi that shows fuller parts of the interview that were left out by Le Iene. It turned out that the lack of payments was the result of something much more complicated and that Filiberti had not told the full story of the extent of the problems and who was not paying what. We did not even need to wait for Zrinzo’s video though. The Iene clip left one huge question hanging over the whole issue. Where were the courts in all this? Why had Filiberti not pursued anyone for lack of payment? Le Iene was not the right place to get his pound of flesh if he felt so deserving of it. There are the courts of law for that.
So yes, to put it short, the Iene line in this particular program was rather tenuous. We did get to see however a very embarrassing performance by the prime minister of a sovereign nation. Stopped on his way to some black tie event in St Julian’s, our Prime Minister’s performance went through various stages. We first had the glow of recognition – the sad man faced with a paparazzo style moment prepared to bask in the limelight like the four year old called on stage in panto. It segued into a moment of excess familiarity while still lulled into a sense of false security – years of experience as a heckling irritating journalist seem to have vanished from Joseph Muscat’s repertoire. He was caught unawares much like a consummate amateur betraying the fact that his love of the limelight will trump common sense anytime.
I will gloss over the embarrassing exchange that is not fit for any statesman since much has been said about that already. Muscat ended his interview by dumping the troupe onto the next sacrificial lamb – in this case Zrinzo Azzopardi, who was made to bear the brunt of Le Iene’s biased line as well as he could. The rest became an exercise of patriotic spamming all over the internet as the nation split between defenders of the faith (don’t touch my country) and those who would rather applaud a faulty interview so long as tomatoes are thrown at the current government’s face.
Once the charade was over and the hyenas had long forgotten the carcass they had attempted to chew on, we were left with the usual jackals. Those who have now been hovering around whatever is left of the kill. It doesn’t matter though, so long as we get to wear the black tie and pay a quarter of a million euros for tasteless art in Castille Square I guess we are doing fine.
“clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you.”
