That’s pretty rich, coming from Labour

The Nationalist Party really should rethink its approach to the issue of student editor Mark Camilleri and his prosecution for publishing that story in the campus newspaper Realta.

If you’re sick of the debate, think again: the saga is still playing out.

It’s obvious that the party is reacting to the stance of Labour’s Owen Bonnici, who criticised the way the young man has been sat upon by the forces of law and order.

Bonnici was correct to say that stamping on this fellow was really too extreme.

The reaction of Nationalist Party exponents should not have been that it wasn’t extreme, or an attempt at justifying the move by saying how horrible the story was.

No, the reaction should be that talk of censorship and of gagging free speech is pretty rich coming from the Labour Party.

Labour uses its media machinery – the media it owns and the media owned by its fellow-travellers – to intimidate, oppress and harass those who oppose it.

I speak from personal experience, but I have seen it done to others so often and wondered at the horror of it: a great, big media monster composed of television, radio, internet sites and newspapers, all pounding in unison on a single person whose only crime is to stand in the Labour Party’s way to power, or so the Movement of Progressives and Moderates sees it.

It is quite hideous.

The Nationalist Party, instead of griping about the qualities of a dirty story, should remind Owen Bonnici that he represents a political party which practises the most effective form of censorship of all: the forceful intimidation of those who oppose it, through the deployment of its giant media machine.

These means of instilling fear are far more effective than any legal gagging orders. Some people would do anything to avoid being put on a roll on Super One, complete with ghastly Charlon Gouder intonation.

THE BISHOP WILL TELL US WHAT TO THINK

As expected, the bishop of Gozo has entered the gagging-order fray with one of his usual scintillating and perceptive remarks. Last year, it was boys dressed up as Jesus (why – because they wore sheets?) and this year it’s about how censorship is a European principle.

Indeed. I believe he has missed rather a lot of ‘European principles’ to get to that one.

The bishop has seized on the ‘precautionary principle’ which is used to govern decisions on whether to allow products onto the market, for instance (if it might cause harm, don’t allow it) and he has applied it in a way that is quite alien to those European principles of which he spoke.

He sees censorship as working on the precautionary principle: that if a story, book, film, show, what-have-you might cause harm to others, then it should be banned.

It is his understanding of what constitutes harm which undermines his reasoning.

The law allows already for ‘harm’ in the form of libel, slander, defamation, or incitement to racial hatred or violence. But these things are crimes or offences.

You cannot prevent the publication or broadcasting of something purely on the grounds that it might, as opposed to will, do some harm, when the harm we are talking of here is entirely to do with personal morality – dirty stories, sexy films, that kind of thing.

You can only slap a rating certificate on them, and that’s about all you can do. Pretty much everything is available on the internet anyway, so bans really don’t make sense.

The bishop of Gozo explained his reasoning like this: “According to the European Commission, in the name of the precautionary principle, authority intervenes to remove whatever products are deemed to be harmful to life or the environment. So in the local educational context, why can’t we apply this precautionary principle used for normal products to the media, as well? If we are so concerned about ecology, why are we not equally concerned about the media environment and human ecology? It has been scientifically proven that the media can be harmful to the psychological and moral health of the individual, so why isn’t it acceptable that we embrace this European principle?”

Perhaps it’s because it would fly in the face of another important European principle: that of free speech and the free exchange of ideas and of discussion, even if there are some people around who don’t like it.

If ideas are to be banned and speech controlled, then who is to take those decisions as to what is banned and what is allowed, what is restricted and what is not?

Surely not the bishop of Gozo, for where would we be then?

It’s interesting that what looms largest in his mind is the ‘scientifically proven’ harm caused by the media, rather than the unimaginable and unquantifiable good it has brought about.

Life might have been simpler in the pre-media dark ages, but it certainly wasn’t any better. The bishop would like to get back there, in some ways at least, with his call for an authority that has the power to “intervene and suppress what in the media world could hinder the educational process.”

If I can think of one thing that really hinders the educational process, especially at university level, it is the instilling of fear among students that if they write X or publish Y, they will end up facing criminal charges.

The only thing this sort of behaviour teaches them is sympathy for their counterparts on Chinese campuses.

But Malta, I’m afraid, is struggling still to emerge from that Chinese embryo. We live in a country where people are actually frightened of free speech and open discussion and regard them as dangerous. They speak about ‘going too far’, a mindset that reveals they think in terms of censorship.

How far is ‘too far’, and who, or what, is going to be deployed to draw the line between what is ‘too far’ and what is not?

That’s why oppressive laws and systems, and authoritarian attitudes, survive – because not enough people want them to go.

This article was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday, last Sunday