The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff Mark Mallia is one of the Prime Minister’s most loyal members of his inner-circle and he is also involved in political party machinations apart from doing government work.
Following the scandal about the potentially fraudulent election of Wayne Sammut‘s to the Labour Party’s Executive Committte at the general conference, the Prime Minister’s inner cicrle has been trying to put a lid on the story to prevent it from running through the press.
In order to avoid the story, Mark Mallia is now planting fake stories about the Labour Party’s politics and is using The Shift News also for this purpose. I have just confirmed that this article, published in The Shift News, was also planted by Mark Mallia. The tactic behind the article is very customary to Labour’s disinformation campġaign: the article includes some factual details mixed with a false story therefore leaving the uninformed reader unable to distinguish between truth and falsity.
It is true that the Prime Minister has been challenged by alternative candidates at the Labour Party’s elections to the executive committee, but not to the extent that The Shift News has reported, and they also got many of the loyalties of the individuals wrong. The main bone of contention, and the elephant in the room, Wayne Sammut, was left altogether out of the article, obviously intentionally by the source, with the author unaware that he is being duped.
Note that the Labour Party isn’t in government because its top leading officials and activists are stupid: they have mastered the media and press in Malta and can influence and manipulate it by the tip of their fingers: Labour is very effective at doing this and even we, who have an intimate knowledge of the Labour Party, may sometimes fall to their tricks.
Note that Alex Sciberras, who is also the prime and unnamed Labour source for MaltaToday, is the President of the Labour Party and has been doing his best to put a lid on this story.
Labour is extremely calculating when it comes to the press and anything it funnels to it should not be taken for granted.
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
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