Going by Facebook, even subliterate halfwits have political views – and so it should be

The Labour Party has asked the Broadcasting Authority to take action against Public Broadcasting Services for allowing Lou Bondi to write a blog and because Joe Azzopardi gave Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando five minutes of telephone advice on how to behave when antagonised by Alfred Sant in the last general election campaign (when, like me, he still thought he was telling the truth).

The problem the Labour Party sees with these things is that Bondi and Azzopardi have done the terribly shocking thing of revealing their political opinions.

Not of HAVING political opinions, you understand, but of making them known.

This is confused thinking at its best. If there is nothing wrong with having political opinions – and if you’re in current affairs, it indicates a serious lack of depth that should automatically disqualify you if you haven’t any – then there should be nothing wrong in making them known.

The angst about this in Malta, with all the crazy and anally retentive (and dysfunctional) rules that surround the Broadcasting Authority, is the direct result of the way that same Labour Party corrupted public broadcasting during its 16 years in government. Xandir Malta was reduced to such shocking levels of socialist propaganda that it has scarred the national psyche to the present day.

When you’ve woken up after election day to find the state broadcaster showing the MLP ‘torca’ as a test-card, while the song ‘Run Rabbit, Run’ is put on a loop to mock the leader of the Opposition, you want to have your mind at rest that it’s not going to happen again.

The honesty of clarity is, in this case, far better than the dishonesty of covert sympathies. It’s much better for people to know where somebody is coming from. As long as they’re decent, professional and the end product is informative and entertaining, who gives a damn how they vote?

The problem with Super One news is not that the people who produce it vote Labour, but that it’s so very shoddy and unprofessional.

Indeed, my problem with Joe Azzopardi, if I have one at all, is precisely that one never really knows with him. I was taken aback when I discovered, after the 1996 general election, that he had voted Labour. It didn’t affect the cordiality between us, but I’d rather have known. Our conversations would have been different.

I much prefer the fact that you know exactly where you stand with Lou Bondi. And for heaven’s sake, surely the Labour Party isn’t suggesting that if it weren’t for his blog, we wouldn’t know what Bondi’s political views are. He was a Nationalist Party employee and official until 1996, and he doesn’t have Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando’s highly unstable personality and character, or tendency to change his political views according to how he believes he is treated and who he thinks loves him more than the others.

So it is safe to assume that he’s not going to be voting for Joseph Muscat (though with Joe Azzopardi I don’t feel I have that level of certainty) and nobody needs his blog to discover that.

People want his blog for something else: the insight it gives into political situations which he cannot give by means of his television show, precisely because there he is impartial in his treatment of subjects and guests.

The reality is that nobody is impartial in their minds, not unless they are automatons. The requirement for PBS reporters and current affairs presenters is only that they are impartial in their professional work.

The people who like to pose as impartial in every aspect of their lives are anything but, and their pose soon cracks, even if you aren’t already able to read their agenda and hostility between the lines.

Take Josanne Cassar, for example (finally I am able to say what I think about her because she no longer works for the same newspaper, even though that never stopped her). She likes to put on an image of being impartial and indifferent to political sympathies. But the reality is that she lives with a man who worked for years for the Labour Party’s propaganda monster, Super One, and she reserves her bitching exclusively for anything to do with the Nationalist Party or those who, like me and unlike her, are not too embarrassed to say which party we vote for.

But then, quite frankly, I am not at all surprised she has always been too embarrassed to say who she votes for, lest we frame everything she writes and does in that context.

Another one is Claire Bonello, writing in The Sunday Times with overt hostility to the Nationalist Party and the government, but rarely with anything to say about Labour, while at the same time pretending to be neutral and avoiding all discussion of the fact that she spent years as an AD activist and distributor of AD propaganda leaflets, and for all we know might still be doing pro bono work for them.

To make the Labour Party seem even more as though it inhabits Alice’s world through the looking-glass, it was Labour MP Gino Cauchi who made these demands at a press conference earlier today.

That’s right: Gino Cauchi, who spent the greater part of his working life as a reporter and newscaster in the PBS newsroom, and then left to join Super One TV, using that exposure to seek (successfully) election as a Labour member of parliament.

Quite frankly, I would much rather have known, when watching the results of Gino Cauchi’s ‘kovriges’ on TVM, that he was a festering Laburist of the sort who would work for Super One news. If he had been a normal Laburist, I wouldn’t have bothered. But either way, I’d much rather have known where he was coming from as he reported for the state TV news bulletin, which is dominated by political activities anyway.

And then we had Edward Scicluna, who was widely regarded as neutral when he featured on TVM shows about politics and general elections, and who then upped and revealed himself as being so rabidly Labour that he was actually prepared to stand on its party ticket for election to the European Parliament.

I’d much rather have known that he supported that anti-EU scum at the time, instead of hiding his true feelings about the matter of EU membership and Alfred Sant, among other things.

Hiding your political beliefs is just another form of lying.

TVM news and current affairs people are barred from being active members of a political party. That’s why Pierre Portelli had to resign from the Nationalist Party before taking up a job co-hosting TVM’s breakfast show with Joe Mifsud. And Joe Mifsud was able to take it up only because Alex Sceberras Trigona has replaced him as Labour’s international secretary.

But this does not mean, for crying out loud, that their audience does not know what their political views are, when they were both active members of political parties for so long.

And you see, with Gino Cauchi, that’s the thing. The way he segued from TVM to Super One, we will never really know to what extent he was involved with the machinations of the Labour Party while working for the state broadcaster.

It’s not that he votes Labour – it’s a free country, dammit – but that his journalistic standards were so very low and shoddy that he wasn’t ashamed to work in the Stalinist pits that are the Super One newsroom. When you consider that he worked in the PBS newsroom for so many years, that’s worrying.