The Labour Party still hasn’t told us whether Joseph Cuschieri paid for their trip to Dubai

Are Malta’s reporters dead in the water? Or are we so wrapped up in Facebook that we can’t see the real stories when they come screaming out at us wearing neon pink and with a siren wailing on their head?

The prominent inclusion of Joseph Cuschieri in the Labour Party’s delegation to Dubai last month should have acted as a clarion call to newsrooms, but it didn’t.

What was he doing there? Cuschieri is a member of the European Parliament. He has nothing to do with Labour Party business in Dubai.

But Cuschieri also has a EUR400,000 annual package from the European Parliament, which includes very generous travel allowances. The only conclusion I can reach is that the Labour Party is milking that package of his to its own ends, and that he funded the trip, in whole or in part, in flagrant breach of EU parliament rules.

When the press is wet and inactive, people like this progressively get away with murder to the point where things get completely out of hand, as we are seeing now with Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando. Nobody in the media ever wanted to question or investigate his live-in partner’s connections with the Labour Party or his constant socialising over the last four years with the Labour leader and his wife.

Why? “Because that is personal.”

My arguments that it isn’t personal at all, and that you cannot divide the personal from the political, raised a storm of controversy. And now I hate to see that I have been proved right in the worst possible way.

Had Joseph Muscat’s relationship with individuals like Jeffrey Pullicino and Consuelo Herrera/Robert Musumeci been put under media scrutiny three years ago, none of this would have happened.

But look: they are still pretending they are not colluding, because the media allow them to pretend, even though we now know, though Jeffrey’s own admission, what close friends they are.

I’ll go one further and say that they each have something on the other, and that Muscat and Pullicino Orlando are both frightened of what the other might say or do.

A weak press helps create these situations. So this is an appeal to my much-valued colleagues in the independent media: wake up. Do something. This is your job.