More Newspeak from Maltastar
Maltastar is, as the name suggests, based in Malta. It is owned by the Malta Labour Party.
But when it wants news of Malta, it turns to the BBC. It did so when it wanted news of our government’s austerity measures, the ones Tony Zarb went to Brussels to protest about with all those other protesters.
Government has told its ministers to keep the policy under wraps. Perhaps that is why the BBC had no information about cost cutting measures in Malta in its austerity drive country by country report this morning. 11 countries were featured amongst them four Mediterranean countries: Italy, France, Spain and Greece.
The truth is too hard to grasp that there are NO austerity measures. Unless, of course, you think that paying something approaching the real cost of water and electricity is an austerity measure.
But oh, wait – Maltastar does have hot news of serious austerity measures in Malta, and goodness, you’re going to need the smelling salts.
The prime minister has told his cabinet to cut down on promotions and not to put any more people on the public sector payroll.
The shame!
And if you think that’s despicable, there’s more and it’s worse:
“Work that used to be carried out by the public sector is also being farmed out to the private sector at very cheap rates.”
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I blame the GonziPN-BBC conspiracy. Someone must have been bought off to keep all this underhandedness under wraps.
Maybe Kevin Ellul Bonici could enlighten us?
“Work that used to be carried out by the public sector is also being farmed out to the private sector at very cheap rates.”
What the world (our little one that is) has come to – Government spending money efficiently! We can’t have that can we?
The problem being raised by maltastar is that government work previously carried out by public sector workers is now being carried out by farmers.
’11 countries were featured amongst them four Mediterranean countries…’
They didn’t even realize that within the same sentence, they put the number ’11’ in figures whereas the number ‘four’ was written in words. Good thing they don’t draft contracts.
[Daphne – These are the rules with newspapers: numbers one to nine are to be written as words, but all numbers from 10 and up are to be written in digits. Exceptions are words like hundred, thousand and million. All numbers that come at the start of a sentence are – obviously – to be written as words, certainly not digits.]
Thanks for enlightening me, I thought there was something strange with the sentence structure.
Well, that was a lucky strike for Maltastar, getting at least one style rule right.
Fill a room with enough monkeys randomly hitting a keyboard and sooner or later they’ll type the Complete Works of Shakespeare. It’s all down to statistics. For further details, ask Edward Scicluna.
But that gem by the hacks at ttamlarsa is a classic.
We have never captured a live alien THEREFORE they must be hidden in Antarctica.
We found no weapons of mass destruction THEREFORE Saddam must be hiding them.
There are no austerity measures in Malta THEREFORE the evil government must be keeping its evil plan under wraps.
HP, Prof. Edward Scicluna should be asked what he thinks about the living wage. He’s been too silent about it.
@La Redoute
The point is that they didn’t get it right. In this case, the number 11 should have been written out. Not that this stylistic nicety was the gravest issue with the sentence:
“11 countries were featured amongst them four Mediterranean countries: Italy, France, Spain and Greece.”
This formulation is grievously wrong in its punctuation, syntax and semantics, not to speak of style and journalism. The writer presumably wanted to say something like:
“Among (as opposed to “amongst”) the 11 countries featured, four are in the Mediterranean: Italy, France, Spain and Greece.”
Granted, this is not a much happier sentence, but at least it doesn’t look as if it were automatically generated by Google Translate.
And anyway, what precisely is the significance of all these four countries being in the Mediterranean?
Is it not a case that “no news is good news”?
I know the rule – I was in that sort of business – but at first I thought that the people at Maltastar find difficulty in spelling “eleven” –