The Sunday Times believes we should only invade the privacy of private persons who are vulnerable or dead

The leading article in The Sunday Times yesterday made an obvious reference to me:

It is also an unfortunate fact that certain journalists in Malta (writing in newspapers as well as on the internet) have chosen to use the space they have to conduct character assassination campaigns against individuals – even going, quite unacceptably, into people’s personal lives while at the same time pontificating about what makes good journalism. Ideally, this would also be regulated.

I suppose I could make a couple of ‘miaow’ remarks and say that the real problem here is that, 16 years down the line, they still haven’t managed to replace me yet, and not for want of trying with a procession of wannabes, most of whom have long since bitten the dust.

But I won’t.

Instead I shall ask The Sunday Times exactly what it hopes to achieve by pressing for restrictions of this nature, and exactly who it wishes to protect from what. Even France no longer thinks like that.

Maybe French citizens finally understood how badly they were served by their press when they saw two unknown women in photographs of Mitterand’s burial and asked who they were. Mitterand’s mistress of decades, they were told, and the daughter he had by her.

If Mitterand could keep secret from his electorate a mistress and daughter who were not a secret to his friends and family, thanks to the protection of the press under misguided privacy rules, then – French citizens asked – what else might he be colluding with the press to keep secret from them?

The Sunday Times concludes that because it is not prepared to do its job properly, then nobody should be allowed to do so. It remains rooted in a mindset where certain things are distasteful, where common mortals have no right to know what those who sit in judgement over them, what those who make the laws by which common mortals must live their lives, get up to in their so-called private lives, even if it has a bearing on their public decisions.

The Sunday Times would have us live in a Malta where members of parliament are obliged to declare their financial assets but where journalists cannot expose their mistresses, lovers, friends, business contacts and party guests, even though all of those have far more bearing and influence on a member of parliament’s decisions than his 100 shares in Cumblajta Ltd and his EUR30,000 in the bank.

It’s not as though we haven’t had the most spectacular example, recently, of how great a danger to democracy is posed by failure to subject certain sorts of public persons to intense and necessary scrutiny. I am speaking, of course, of Consuelo Scerri Herrera and Robert Musumeci, the one a magistrate and the other a politician. There are others.

Politicians have every reason to collude on a privacy law. They cover each other’s backs even now by keeping quiet about foibles of which they are well aware, using the excuse that it’s because these matters are private and irrelevant. But they’re not irrelevant, are they, and electors have a right to know the full picture of the people who are presented to them for their vote.

Politicians keep quiet about each other not because of “good taste” – a reluctance to discuss these matters is actually very, how shall I put it, lower middle class, as most forms of fastidiousness are – but because they don’t want to begin a war of attrition. Both sides have potential victims so both sides say nothing.

The Sunday Times shouldn’t be colluding in this. It should break ranks and remember that it’s there to serve its readers and not to decide what its readers are allowed to know.

In taking decisions on what its readers are permitted to know, it is not much different from those who believe that we need censorship boards to decide what we are allowed to watch.

Thanks to attitudes like that of The Sunday Times, we live in a country where we are expected to vote for individuals of whom we know little or nothing, or only what those individuals choose to tell us about themselves.

The Sunday Times seems to have forgotten the basic tenet that if people ask for our vote, they should expect our scrutiny. Its readers are crying out for a well-examined profile of Yana Mintoff, for example, but with all those resources at its disposal it will not provide one. Instead, it reports faithfully what Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando says on his Facebook wall. Or is that The Times?

The way the Maltese press uses privacy and so-called good taste as poor masks for its own sore inadequacies – it’s a lot easier not to do something than to do it, and it’s certainly a lot more comfortable to transcribe Jeffrey’s Facebook wall than to research a proper story – was fully illustrated when Yana Mintoff arrived in the spotlight. Many people had no idea Dom Mintoff had children, still less that he had a daughter called Yana.

When Cyrus Engerer was introduced to her over dinner, the name rang no bells (I know this through his own report of the encounter).

Back in the 1980s, people in Malta didn’t know that their own prime minister had two daughters called Anne and Yana (formerly Joan), and if they knew of their existence, they certainly didn’t know what they looked like. But they knew that the British prime minister had a son called Mark and a daughter called Carol and they could even recognise them in photographs. We knew what Mark Thatcher looked like. We had no idea what Yana Mintoff looked like.

That’s how bad it was in Malta, thanks to attitudes like those expressed yesterday in The Sunday Times leading article.

I find it fascinating, too, that The Sunday Times believes it is only public persons who should be safeguarded from media “intrusion” and “character assassinations”, possibly because it is only public persons who might sue them.

Yet The Times and timesofmalta.com, which share a newsroom with The Sunday Times, are perfectly content to invade the privacy of private persons – who are protected at law – especially when they have just died in unusual circumstances, are drug dependent, have been hospitalised after falling off a ladder in their own home, or are suffering from depression.

We read The Times and find out that Joe Borg, aged 72, was taken to hospital after falling downstairs while painting a wall in his own home. Who cares? But more to the point, it’s nobody’s business. Joe Borg is not a public person.

But when Joseph Muscat, leader of the Opposition and prime minister in waiting, spent an entire summer out of public view after claiming that he had fractured his leg – the real reason, I suspect, is that he tried a hair transplant which failed – The Times and The Sunday Times took his word for it and didn’t bother to find out why we never saw him on crutches. We just never saw him at all.

Because that’s the leader of the Opposition. You shouldn’t pry or invade his privacy. But Joe Borg, 72, from Floriana – well, that’s a different matter. The Times and The Sunday Times can pry and invade all they like.

The latest example of The Times’s twisted reasoning is below. If I were to say that a member of parliament is behaving the way he does because he suffers from manic depression or is an alcoholic, The Sunday Times would classify this as character assassination and an outrageous intrusion into his privacy, rather than a dutiful relaying of the facts about one of the people’s representatives.

But it is quite all right by The Sunday Times when its sister daily broadcasts to the world, permanently on the internet, the information that a private citizen is being treated for depression and was found sleeping in a field. They even took great care to illustrate the news with a photograph of his face, which could no longer be justified on the basis of an appeal to look for him, because he had been found already.

The excuse that it was his relatives which spoke about it doesn’t hold water at law, on an ethical basis or in fact. The media are barred from reporting details about private citizens and whether or not those details are disclosed by relatives is irrelevant.

I’m shocked. There should be a new law against this sort of thing. Oh, but there is one already, and I suppose the only reason The Times didn’t bother with it is because the depressed man won’t be suing them any time soon.

Monday, May 7, 2012, 09:30
Missing man found asleep in Attard field

Philip Farrugia, 50, who was missing for more than a week, was found late yesterday.

Informed sources said he was found sleeping in a field in Attard.

The family and the police had renewed their appeal for information earlier yesterday, with the family expressing fears over the fact that he had been receiving treatment for depression.