I have many friends at MaltaToday and I’m also friends with Saviour Balzan, although I doubt he will appreciate my friendship after this article. Readers are however asking me why my story on the magistrate inquiry being concluded is running contrary to MaltaToday’s.
Well, it’s obvious what is going on, and since Matthew Vella has left his editorship of the paper, MaltaToday has become a prop for the government. MaltaToday was the first newspaper that broke the fake story that the magistrate applied for an extension of the inquiry. It is also misquoting PN by writing on the “magistrate’s extension” yet in PN’s PR and letter to the Standards Commissioner, nowhere do they mention that the magistrate applied for an extension.
Note the particular language of this headline that is explicitly constructed to put the blame on the magistrate and this was before Robert Abela made his attack on the judiciary.
In recent months and weeks, editorials of MaltaToday read like Russian editorials of journalists pleading to their benevolent Tsar to change his opinion. When in the last weeks Robert Abela faced the most critical moment in his premiership, he got interviewed twice in a row by a MaltaToday editor, the first time by Kurt Sanson e who gave an extremely ingratiating interview, and the second time, surrounded by a mob of his Labour supporters who cheered him whilst booing the journalist – this is not journalism, but a well constructed and well-crafted propaganda campaign by Saviour Balzan in his services to the Prime Minister. I will not hesitate to say that Saviour Balzan is using his employees and making a mockery of journalism.
Let me be clear. MaltaToday is government funded and is currently being used by its owner to defend the Prime Minister. While MaltaToday editors take their time to ingratiate with the Prime Minister and play his little games, independent journalists are investigating organised crime with limited resources – if this isn’t a mockery of journalism then what is it?
Indeed, the last interview by the Prime Minister wasn’t an interview at all – the journalist can’t conduct a proper interview and challenge the Prime Minister with a mob booing him down. The interview was merely a monologue by the Prime Minister full of lies. He attacked the Nationalist Party many times and once again attacked the magistrate for not finishing the inquiry (another lie). It is also ironic that the Prime Minister lied in this interview about introducing an anti-SLAPP law in Malta – on the contrary, Robert Abela is introducing a law that acknowledges foreign SLAPP cases in Maltese courts and this law goes against the new EU directive. It is ironic that Abela would mention this because, in fact, Saviour Balzan was also a consultant to the Prime Minister for law, yet Balzan is making no opposition whatsoever to a law that inevitably hurt independent journalists and increase their caseload. Obviously, Saviour Balzan doesn’t care because under Labour he is no longer an investigative journalist, and strictly just a propagandist.
I would have preferred not to write this, but MaltaToday can be effective in distorting this truth because it still has a lot of credibility due to the past work of many of its journalists, sadly all of this credibility is quickly leaving them.
Here I have been very diplomatic. The main subject is the Prime Minister who has captured an independent media organisation and turned it into his own prop. The Prime Minister is a man who personally and confidentially to his inner circle speaks about his enemies and political opponents as “?a nkissru lil dak il-liba” and “Nag?millu ?ajtu infer” – and Saviour is helping this man who thinks this way about journalists who write on him. A Prime Minister with a long criminal record and an extensive list of criminal associates and business partners. Still today, as a Prime Minister he personally and directly covers up for hardened criminals and political criminals, some of whom were involved or suspected to be involved in the murder of a journalist. On one side there are those who are investigating Robert Abela and on the other side, there are those who are helping him. I think readers are intelligent enough to understand what is going on in the local press industry and the emerging splits within it.
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
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