I look forward to reading government appointee Michela Spiteri’s column in The Sunday Times on the subject of Elton Taliana
I have no doubt that Michela Spiteri is going to write about the Police Board hearing and its outcome. After all, this – and not the rehabilitation of capital cities – is her field of specialisation.
And nobody gives a damn about the 10 minutes she waited for a man to load his car, and how he failed to thank her and tug his forelock, which is what she wrote about last Sunday, apparently in the belief that it’s the stuff of national newspapers.
When she worked at all, she worked for the Attorney-General’s office. She is perfectly placed to give us a professional opinion.
She can’t exactly avoid the subject and write yet again about some inanity as she has been doing ever since her father’s best friend (business associate?) Louis Grech became the deputy prime minister and appointed her father to the board of the national airline, which was Grech’s personal stomping-ground for years.
Her editor should remind her that she is not paid to serve her own interests or of those close to her, but those of her readers. If she is uncomfortable taking the government to task where necessary because the deputy prime minister is a close friend of the family and always round at their house, because she has a relationship of mutual convenience (conspiracy?) with the Law Commissioner who allows her to use his blog to attack others in the messes she creates in her private life, and because she a government appointee herself, as announced in the Government Gazette last Friday, then she should make way for somebody more honest in his or her views.
The same goes for The Sunday Times columnist Claire Bonello, another government appointee. She has no difficulty sitting on the same board of directors as that disreputable person Frank Portelli, but she has a real problem calling a spade a spade where the Labour Party is concerned.
Bonello has spent the last several years tearing the Nationalist Party/government to shreds (she went to The Sunday Times directly from Malta Today). As an acknowledgement for unpaid and uncontracted services rendered, Prime Minister Muscat has appointed her to the board of Public Broadcasting Services Ltd, along with Portelli who was appointed for the same reason.
Bonello is a lawyer. She, too, is perfectly placed to give a professional opinion on the matter of Elton Taliana. I hope she has the intellectual honesty to do so. As with Spiteri, her editor should remind her that she is paid to serve the interests of her readers (and thus, of the newspaper) and not her own.
Which brings us to another columnist in the same newspaper stable: Kenneth Zammit Tabona. His shameless use of his platform in Times of Malta, for which he is paid to serve the interests of the newspaper and its readers, to serve his own interests instead, is unrivalled.
In return for using his Tuesday column, for which the newspaper pays him, to campaign for the Labour Party and salivate over Joseph Muscat, he has now been at the receiving end of a series of positions, perks and privileges. Not content with those, he is also trying to wangle a government flat on St John’s Square for him and “mummy”. This will allow him to leave the flat he already owns in St Julian’s and rent it out for an income – possibly because the market for his water-colours has been decimated among his own kind and The High Society prefer to spend their money on other things – while living for free in a grace-and-favour apartment in a prime location in the capital.
I should not have to explain why Allied Newspapers Ltd must not allow its ‘independent’ keynote columnists to use their platform in its newspapers in exchange for personal gain. It should deal with the matter immediately, because its own reputation is now suffering.
One columnist doing this would be too much already, but three? Independent keynote columnists are not the same thing as politicians who occasionally write a column, and who are rarely paid for it because they do it for their own publicity.
The guiding principle at all times must be that you are paid by the newspaper, so it is the newspaper’s interests you serve. With newspapers like The Sunday Times, Times of Malta, The Malta Independent and The Malta Independent on Sunday, the newspaper’s interests are those of its readers. That is how they built their credibility.
![Labour government appointee and The Sunday Times columnist Michela Spiteri, whose father is a close friend (business associate?) of deputy prime minister Louis Grech](https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Michela-Spiteri.jpg)
Labour government appointee and The Sunday Times columnist Michela Spiteri, whose father is a close friend (business associate?) of deputy prime minister Louis Grech
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http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2013-09-01/news/police-request-fb-data-for-general-elections-act-violations-2472378369/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=facebook
You are absolutely brilliant, Daphne.
I wish you a good Sunday.
Re the apartment on St. John’s Square – flats number 2 and 3 are vacant and used as a store.
The attention of the Lands Department has been drawn to this fact repeatedly, but a senior manager – now on the MEPA board – preferred to maintain the status quo despite the pressure for allocation.
Yes, there are empty flats there, in government hands. But Kenneth Zammit Tabona, who has a flat of his own and an income, should not be getting one as a reward for using his column in a national newspaper to heap praise on Joseph Muscat.
This is disgraceful. The parasite culture reigns supreme. If Kenneth Zammit Tabona wants to live in Valletta, he should buy or rent a flat like everybody else.
As for the flats, government should rent them out on the private market. A flat on St John’s Square would fetch a handsome sum. The government will need all the income it can get if it is to sustain the remuneration of useless chairmen like Zammit Tabona.
Simply outstanding. Editors, take note.
You let us down, Mich. Shame.
Every day that passes, this is becoming shockingly more relevant once again …
http://www.melitensiabooks.com/Picture%20396-2.jpg?0.16593684797364305
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20130901/local/police-board-inquiry-report-travesty-of-justice-simon-busuttil.484371
Intellectual honesty.
These individuals built their writings on the utter avoidance of anything resembling truth. That requires exposure of soul and genuine curiosity.
They snap, ridicule, protest and lay out their misgivings, consuming every subject, argument or idea with ravenous zeal. Trust them to latch onto anything to hog it and push themselves.
Whenever I read their work, it seems the only opinion they have is of themselves. They’ve become the symptom of Labour’s vice, intrepreters of gist, slant or angle.
Whatever that is. Usually personal, limited and somewhat perpetually unsatisfied.
A self-immolating establishment. An elite which won’t take action, reluctant to be true to their fiction.
Unfortunately, news has been replaced by opinion and many readers do not appear to be making a difference between one and the other with the result that they are accepting what these self-serving sycophants say as the truth.
The Times lets them get away with it and has been letting them get away with it for quite a long time.
From what I hear, some of their readers have finally had enough and their sales are falling.
Where is their board of directors and why haven’t they reminded their editors what their core paying leadership consists of and of the need for the newspapers to sell if they are to remain a viable business?
I, too, look forward to seeing what they have to say on this and other serious matters which they have constantly and repeatedly chosen to ignore.
Michela Spiteri runs her own blog, dedicated to demystifying the justice system. If she won’t use her column to comment on the case of Elton Taliana, she can do so on her blog. It’ll make a change from using it to snipe at women who have what she wants for herself.
Yes, and it might – might, not will – convince us that she’s got wider ambitions than looking like a praying mantis that’s raided the ugly-wig cupboard, and that she is capable of more than chasing married men and disrupting family lives because it’s “fun”.
Times of Malta and its sister Sunday newspaper are being disrespectful to their readers by allowing their columnists to accept rewards from the government for services rendered through the use of their column.
A lot of people buy Times of Malta and The Sunday Times out of habit, and that is why Allied Newspapers is not concerned at all. It can afford to take its readers for granted and serve its own interests as well.
What applies to the columnists applies to its reporters too. Not all of them have the same integrity, and yet Times of Malta keeps them on its payroll.
Not so any longer. They are losing readership by the day. They think it is because people are reading the online edition for free, so they make people pay for it. But it isn’t. It’s because of their reporting.
On what basis does Kenneth Zammit Tabona qualify for a government-owned flat? He is neither homeless nor destitute, manages to support himself and his mother and employs at least one live-in houseboy and sometimes two.
If he feels that a flat in the cente of Valletta is a deserved address for the director of a baroque festival, then he is perfectly capable of buying one himself.
On the basis that since he’s gay, he belongs to a Minority. Or does he?
On the basis that going to Valletta for his 9am coffee at Cafe Cordina is, oh so boring. I do wonder sometimes what his erstwhile coffee partners make of him now. To think that this lazy sod was once at the cusp of power in a bank with the chairman in his pockets…
Perhaps these columnists should now start listing the committees etc.on which they sit. Of course, they might create a problem of space for the editor.
The crucial point here is that if the government cannot see that the Police Board report is essential unjust, then the government is truly unfit to run the country.
We didn’t need this latest mess to know that, did we?
The secret (which is no secret at all) is that it is all about controlling the media. With a firm grip on One and PBS, all that Joseph Muscat has to do is to systematically rein in individual independent journalists and columnists and once that is done, the independent media will follow suit.
The going price of freedom of speech, or rather its loss, is nothing more than a few political appointments these days.
Surprisingly, that is not much in monetary terms and whatbis worse is that it is all state funded (i.e. paid by our taxes).
Does anyone remember when “In-… Taghna” was the last bastion of free speech in this country? At this rate, we will be lucky if we are left with as much.
Was (is) Michela Spiteri, the big pony’s ghost writer when the English and the writing style changed drastically?
Oh, yes, though he hotly denies it.
One very simple solution that hits were it hurts: stop buying any newspaper that no longer represents your opinion and your value set, and which unashamedly forgets that the same bunch burnt it to cinders not so long ago.
What does top student / high achiever / top criminal lawyer / Law Commissionser / head of constitutional reform Franco Debono think about collusion between police and ministry officials and independent board members in pursuit of their common enemy?
Nothing … he’s too busing enjoying (and protecting) his iced bun.
Are newspaper circulation numbers in Malta public and are they published, like, say the USA?
No.
Thanx for confirming my tingle that Ms Claire Bonello is a Labour supporter. Her columns were always against the previous government and she still keeps on writing about PN in a really negative way.
Michela Spiteri might also usefully write a piece about why, on at least two separate occasions, the deputy prime minister failed to deputise for his boss.