Tag: The Times of Malta

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Mediawatch

The Sacking of a Journalist

The fourth estate being what it is, the news of the sacking of a trainee journalist (he was on probation) in a particular set of circumstances warrants careful examination. J’accuse has a long history of criticising the workings of the mainstream press and is not about to hold back now. I am of course referring to the premature termination of Matt Bonanno’s contractual arrangement with the employers at the Times of Malta. Such termination did not require much of an explanation given that Bonanno was on probation i.e. the sacking required no explanation at all.

This does not mean however that we cannot look further into what happened and how it happened. Now that we have the news from the horse’s mouth (Matt Bonanno’s facebook note – reproduced with his permission further down) we can look at what could possibly have motivated the geniuses at the Times to nip this particular career in the bud. First a little set of clarifying facts:

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(1) Bonanno posted the information of the impending Ministerial visit to tal-Qroqq on a facebook wall that belonged to a friend of his: Ms Abela Garett.

(2) Bonanno did NOT pick up the invitation sent to him in reply by Ms Abela Garrett in which he was asked to “bring his notebook along” to tal-Qroqq the next day for the pre-meditated, non-spontaneous display of disaffection at the Minister’s dealings with public transport.

(3) Bonanno did not inform his editors of the possible protest action – and this is assuming he gave any importance to the wall reply by Abela Garett.

(4) The Times sent ANOTHER journalist to cover Austin Gatt’s university visit. The visit and ensuing ministerial heckling was reported on the Times as it was on all other papers.

(5) The PN sleuths trying to discredit the protesting by Abela Garett included in their list of grievances that (a) the protest was premeditated; (b) Bonanno’s message on facebook was part of the pre-meditation.

(6) While more of the “premeditated” “non-spontaneous” bull was being thrown in direction of the theatrical performance, the Times chose to sever ties with one link in the chain of “premeditation” and sacked Matt Bonanno without so much as a by your leave.[/box]

It stinks. It does. And I do not believe for one moment the whole “conspiracy theory” or the Times is a confederacy of nationalists business. What we have here is an organ that likes to kid itself of being impartial and super partes when it comes to reporting the news suddenly developing a panic attack that it might in some way be “implicated” in a supposed “frame up” of Minister Gatt.

J’accuse believes that the Times people gave absolutely no thought whatsoever to what they were doing before the knee jerk reaction of sacking Matt Bonanno. If the Times had not swallowed  so completely all the bull being shot into their direction by Messrs Bondi, Caruana Galizia and Co. about the evil nature of “non-spontaneous protest” they would have, possibly (and hopefully) noticed that Bonanno’s sole “sin” actually forms part of the repertoire of your average hack.

Yes. The Times sacked a journalist for behaving like one. Activists and ground level journalists constantly interact. Lord knows how many faxes about protests I sent in my time as an activist. If I wanted my organisation to be in the news I’d pretty damn well tell the journalist to “bring his notebook along” and pray to God that he follows suit.

Was Bonanno wrong to tell Abela Garett that Minister Gatt would be at Uni the next day? No. It’s public information after all. Nothing wrong in that.

Was Bonanno wrong not to inform his editors about possible protests occurring on the day? Again all evidence points to exculpating Bonanno. If anything, Bonanno would have abused of such information by “scooping” the issue and being on hand for the news item. Instead he probably did not even bother at all.

The uglier scenario is the alternative one. What if HE HAD told the Times editors that he suspected a possible protest against Austin Gatt on campus? What would they have done? Why are they so eager for the news? Their action (the sacking) might lead us to suspect that they would be more interested in forewarning the Minister than in actually reporting the event. After all they did get the report just the same but their reaction (the sacking) makes them seem rather angry about it all. The thing is… they lost control. They could not control the news. They had to follow and report.

Matt Bonanno’s inadvertent – and I insist unplanned – slipping of the bit of info to Abela Garrett led the Times to behave as a normal newspaper – one that reports the news as it unfolds before it without trying to tamper in any way. The moment though that the PN machine set the wheels in motion and started pointing fingers about absurd theories of “premeditation” and “nonspontaneity” the Times panicked.

And Matt was their perfect scapegoat.

 

Matt’s Note on Facebook (reproduced with his permission).

[box] I wasn’t going to write an explanation at first, but seeing as though gossip and rumours are being fired off from all sides, I thought it would be best to have my perspective wedged somewhere in between all the bullshit. Not that I ultimately give a damn what people think; times like these make it easier to realise who is not worth your time. Firstly, let me be the first to admit that what I did (and what I did exactly will be explained next) was spectacularly naive, and mildly unprofessional.

What I did was this: The day before the incident, I posted on Ms Abela Garrett’s wall, “Guess who’s going to be at University tomorrow.” I barely paid attention to her comment in which she told me she was going to give me a good story. So much so that I didn’t even tell my editors about it, and as a result did not attend the event, which by the way was public and not in the least bit top secret. Therefore, the whole thing was not orchestrated in any way. If I really, intentionally wanted to orchestrate something like that, I would have messaged her privately, not joked semi-publicly on her Facebook wall. In the words of John Cleese in a Monty Python sketch, I may be an idiot but I’m no fool.

A couple of other things which need to be cleared up are:

1) I did not write the article. I was busy following George Pullicino around a valley at the time and call him as my witness.

2) It was not me who decided to portray Ms. Abela Garrett as a heroine. I have no ill feeling towards The Times, especially my former colleagues in the newsroom.

Even though I feel my sacking was harsh, I was still on probation and they were well within their rights to give me the boot. The only thing I was disappointed about was not being given the chance to explain myself or apologise, in person. I was of course asked to explain myself via email on Thursday, since I was off that day, but I kept it brief and intended to explain myself fully, in front of the editors, the next day. On Friday, after being left in the newsroom for about 2 hours, I was called to HR and told my probation was terminated with immediate effect. To be honest I didn’t give my side of things, seeing as I wasn’t asked to. I don’t beg.

Neither am I going to be bearing a grudge against the bloggers who blew the incident out of proportion. They do what they do and I should have known better than to give them fuel to fire their own agendas.

And before they claim they don’t have an agenda, if Messrs. Bondi (sorry but I can’t be arsed putting the accent on the i) and Caruana Galizia were the journalists they claim to be, they would have phoned me to get my side of things before stampeding towards their own, warped conclusions. But that’s not how they work, obviously.

I will say one thing however. Caruana Galizia claims not to be on Facebook, but that makes her lifting photos, statuses etc. from the site and putting them on her blog even more morbid and stalker-like. Then again, she probably doesn’t search for them herself (if she does then she really does need to get a life) and has her minions do it for her. To these sad, miserable sycophants I say: do the rest of us a favour and stop robbing the planet of oxygen.

Actually now that I think of it I’d better remove the pictures of me French kissing a horse with a Labour flag draped over it while attending a pasta najt. (Kidding, Daffy) Finally, a big soppy thank you to my friends who have supported me over the past few days.

I’m touched, really. Anyway, I’ll be getting on with my life now.

Over and out. Matthew Bonanno.

Ps. I wish Maltatoday had chosen a better photo of me. [/box]

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Mediawatch

Inconvenient Strikes

More confused reporting. The Times. Again. This time they report Pulse – a student organisation. I am left wondering whether Pulse got partially quoted or whether Pulse are plain stupid. The subject matter is a very specific ATP strike – a transport strike. The ATP chose to strike where it hurts most and have threatened to suspend the Mater Dei bus service indefinitely until they get whatever it is they are whinging about.

Let’s face it. ATP were never the greatest sympathy stirrers in the history of Malta. We all remember the great bus strike a couple of years back. Like the firemen in England who threatened to strike on the eve of the 5th November (Guy Fawkes night – fireworks – most dangerous to not have firemen), the ATP figured that it would strike in the one sector where its service would be most sorely missed.

And then the Times reports the reaction (among others) of Pulse thusly:

The Pulse students’ organisation this afternoon regretted a decision by the bus owners’ association (PTA) to suspend bus services to and from Mater Dei Hospital, saying this would also affect University students. (…) Pulse in its statement said that while it recognised the right of the bus drivers to take industrial action, it was unfair that thousands of students would not be able to use the buses to go to University. It urged the Transport Ministry and Transport Malta to remedy the situation.

Bravi. I mean we are used to block headed transport people – from bus to taxi to karozzin drivers but what were Pulse thinking? They wanted to support the idea of the strike in principle you see – just totter over to facebook to see the  gleeful manner in which young progressives are attempting to pin this onto GonziPN. At the same time though they could not help pointing out that this strike – the right to which they fully recognise and which id definitely Gonzi’s fault – is quite an inconvenience to University students. They even used one of the trendy progressive terms – “unfair” as in “mhux fjer ta!”.

Now if only strikers could come up with a way of striking effectively without inconveniencing anyone. I really hope it’s a case of wrong reporting from the Times.

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Articles

J'accuse : Friends

I am happy to say that I have a lot of friends who vote Nationalist (or Labour). I am not, if I may add, particularly ashamed to be seen with them. There. I’ve said it. I’ve come out and said it. It was killing me really, having to keep this secret to myself all this time, but now that I’ve come out and relieved myself of this bit of info burdening my conscience I feel much better.

If my declaration does not sound ridiculous enough, then what would you think if I felt the need to specify that “Actually I have some friends who are black”? You’d think me to be some weirdo living in some pre-Rosa Parks world of racial segregation. Incidentally, this is the 50th anniversary of the publication of that magnificent book by Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird – published only five years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus. I owe Harper Lee much of the inspiration for taking the legal career path, thanks to her unflinching Atticus Finch. Ironically, Harper Lee lives a very segregated life in Monroeville, Alabama (the real Maycomb from the story), conceding few interviews and having written pretty much nowt since the book that was voted into the top 10 must-reads of a lifetime (beating the Bible in the process).

It is very probable that the Mockingbird is a fictionalised autobiography of Harper Lee and that the character Scout in the book is actually Lee herself. Her best friend in the book, named Dill, is thought to be Harper Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote. Though the friendship drifted apart in later years, neither of them was ever heard to say that they were ashamed of knowing one another.

Gays in the village

You know where I am coming from with all this “I have X friends” business – and no I do not mean Facebook. I am obviously referring to Prof. Anthony Zammit’s remark during the proceedings before the House Social Affairs Committee  (HSAC) at the temple of conservatism and bigotry. The subject was “the situation of homosexuals and transgender individuals” in Malta, and the information that we have at hand comes with the courtesy of a very “xarabankified” Times as one of my readers described it. For it is important to bear in mind that, in fulfilling its reporting duty, the Strickland House product seems to have shifted towards a more “provocative” approach in the presentation of its material – in some cases denaturing the very subject being reported.

It was thusly that The Times’ David Schembri kicked off with a very titillating title What Happens in the Bedroom is the Government’s Business only to fall foul of the timesofmalta.com inquisition and retract to a more moderate Parliament discusses gay rights (technical geeks did notice that the permalink (article’s web address) remained the same though – baby steps for The Times tech). So yes, as in Malawi, gay rights are still an issue for Malta’s democratic institutions to discuss.

What makes an individual (you’ve got to love the stressed use of the term ‘individual’ in the title on the HSAC’s agenda) gay? What is a gay couple? And what roles do they perform in the household? These are some of the crucial questions that seem to be automatically raised in this committee that feels and acts very much like some Victorian committee questioning Darwin’s preposterous assertions on apes, men and the like.

Only that here, thanks to a mixture of confused (and I may add unfair) reporting and clueless honourable gentlemen, we were not discussing the evolutionary merits of the opposable thumb but rather issues of a more personal nature of thousands of ‘individuals’ who inhabit the islands of Malta in the 21st century. We needn’t go so far as examining the red-hot issue of “gay adoption” that inevitably sparks fires and heats debates even in the most liberal of nations. We are talking of basic rights and liberties – such as the right to marry (and I speak of the civil law right for people not giving two hoots about sacraments humanly concocted in some Diet or Council in Trent).

Queer folk

The news from the HSAC was not promising though. There seemed to be much banter about whether it was the government’s business to have an eye in every bedroom. Edwin Vassallo’s assertion that “Yes it was” because we bear the consequences of such things as “teenage pregnancies and single parenthoods” looked slightly out of place in a forum discussing couples whose ability to reproduce among themselves can best be described as impossible. So unless some new religion is in the making, complete with dogma of “impossible conception”, something was definitely wrong with the perspective of the lawmakers in the House. Sure The Times correspondent peppered his “report” with anecdotes about MGRM’s ideas on “creative ways to have children” but surely this was not the original point of the agenda?

It then moved to the slightly queer (sorry) when Honourable Conservative Member Beppe Fenech Adami resorted to ballistic logic (in the sense that he approached the subject with the same level of convincing logic as a suicide terrorist strapped with explosives): What roles for gay partners? Who’s the man and who’s the woman in a relationship? Given that it is already hard to determine such “roles” in the post-nuclear family – we’ve all heard the one about the one who wears the trousers – the questions were as anachronistic as they were offensive. As BFA proceeded to prove that, since switching roles is not done in his domus, it couldn’t work anywhere else, the gods of logic threw a tantrum and collectively resigned.

At which point you can picture Prof. Anthony Zammit making his dramatic entry armed with a Damocletian sword and delivering the coup de grace to a discussion that never really stood on tenable grounds. “I have gay friends and I am not ashamed to be seen with them in public”. Ta-da indeed. I must confess that I do not know much about Prof. Zammit beyond what I read in the papers, but even had the pinker corners of the web not led to my discovery that he had more than a passing interest in the discussion, the kind of statement he came up with is flabbergastingly ridiculous. The only conclusion we could draw from the “xarabankified” report was that our current crop of representatives is far from representing a large crop of the voting population.

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Friends of friends

There’s that phrase again. Programmes on TV this week were rather amusing. Lou (of Bondiplus of Where’s Everybody?) got spanked on the backside by the BA for his Lowell programme, so Peppi (of Xarabank of Where’s Everybody?) set up a programme discussing freedom of expression and Lou’s spanking. Guests on the programme? Another ta-da moment. Lou Bondi and the ubiquitous media guru Joe Borg Father. I spotted WE’s Norman Vella on Facebook claiming that “In this programme Lou Bondi will not be the only guest. He will face people who publicly expressed themselves against his programme with Norman Lowell”. Incidentally, he was replying to a comment by Borg Cardona who had just implied that the Xarabank programme had an incestuous element in it.

The criteria used by the Xarabank crew reminds me of certain Times’ editorials (or of a conversation between Lou and Fr Joe) where they seem to assume that they are the only people to have a relevant opinion or to have actually expressed an opinion on any given subject. All three – Xarabank, Bondiplus and The Times – have become an institutionalised form of their relative medias and it is in that spirit that they are criticised. Frankly, all three could hold whatever opinion they like but their constant editorial position that obliterates any opinion they consider irrelevant (for irrelevant read uncomfortable to deal with) is worrying and stinks of a systematic effort to retain the stranglehold that they have built over a large chunk of the fourth estate.

I am not too sure that the credibility of all three is the same as they enjoyed a while back, even among the more conservative of elements. Having long abdicated one of the primary journalistic duties of proper investigation, they are now lost in a navel-gazing world of their own and they have constantly proved unable to deal with the wider democratisation of the media. While their voices might still be strong enough to be heard, and while they can still afford to ignore the disparate contradictory elements, they are noticing that their grasp is weakening and their efforts to remedy the situation is only leading them to descend into the comically absurd. So yes. We have Lou as a guest on Peppi’s show discussing how Lou and Peppi’s company should be allowed freedom of expression. Jolly good, I say.

Friendly fire

Finally, a few notes on friendly fire. Joseph Muscat was on Myriam Dalli’s TX this week. TX is a programme on Labour’s One TV (did I mention that we STILL have party-owned TVs in 21st century Malta?), so such notions as bias and doctored questions are only to be expected as annoying intervals in between shots of that Mediterranean beauty that is the programme presenter. The other person on the show glared at the camera and warned of the problems of corruption in the country while standing fast behind such weird notions as carte blanche for whistleblowers and promising the people €50 million (take from Peter give back to Peter) for the “unjust tax on vehicles”. Rather than traipsing uselessly with the kangaroos, Joe might want to polish up his knowledge of recent (very recent) ECJ jurisprudence before harping on about the latter subject. (I have friends who studied European Law and I am not ashamed to be seen with them).

Two notes on GonziPN and friends. Well done for the WiFi spots around the country. That is a bit more tangible than all the words about Vision 2015. Surely you should warn interested citizens that “free public WiFi” is not eternal. As in all similar European projects, expect a shift to paid services in the near future – whether big brother tells you or not. Also GonziPN’s little tryst with “non-politicians” at Vision2015+ felt like a very manufactured and simulated business among friends. Funny that name – Vision 2015+. A government plan gets a “+” tagged onto it and it becomes a party meet. A bit like programmes getting a “+” on their name on national TV. All they needed were Lou and Peppi at Vision 2015+ … but wait… they were there. So it’s OK, innit?

www.akkuza.com (j’accuse) has 301 friends on its Facebook page. Would you be ashamed to be seen as one of them?