I am showcasing these comments so that the press may consider the role it played in creating this shocking situation
May I remind you all – drive the point home – that this 15-year-old girl is dead at the hands of her teacher. Whether directly or indirectly is irrelevant – he is responsible. She is dead.
The press is directly responsible for creating this situation of empathy with a man now accused of murder. The coverage given to a teacher who absconded with his pupil as thought they were two escaped teenagers fleeing parental authority, and the manner in which he was portrayed as ‘helping her’ while she was ‘unhappy’ is what conditioned the vast army of stupid people out there into thinking of him as a ‘miskin’ while the dead girl is written out of the equation or portrayed as 1. crazy, and/or 2. a seductress who lured him into sin and ruined his life.
I address my journalistic colleagues directly: never, but never, underestimate the stupidity of people. It is vast. It is profound. It is without limits, unquantifiable. People do not think clearly. They are irrational. What might seem blatantly obvious has to be explained painstakingly, spelled out and repeated.
The first message people hear will stick, and it will stick whatever new facts are presented to them. Instead of using those new facts to rearrange their original opinion, they will try to manipulate the new facts or dismiss them so as to hold on to that original opinion so that they needn’t be arsed with thinking the whole thing through again.
When it comes to politics, be as irresponsible as you like (even though you should not). When it comes to the death of a 15-year-old girl in the presence of a teacher who literally drove off with her at night and bought her pills and whisky, then took her to some cliffs where she ended up dead, you have a great and terrible responsibility to ensure that you do not create public opinion as immensely stupid, dangerous and hurtful as this.
Compare the way you are treating this man, who stands accused with the murder of one of his pupils, no less, with the way you handled the ‘cat killer’ coverage. Then hang your heads in shame.
When you know that a disproportionate number of people in Malta are stupid, ignorant, uninformed, uneducated and irrational, journalists have an even bigger responsibility and they should not take it lightly.
32 Comments Comment
Reply to bob-a-job Click here to cancel reply
The primacy and decency effect in memory whenever we learn or remember something: we remember best the first thing we read or learn, and second best the last thing we read or learn.
This is not related to intelligence or IQ.
This is why things like headlines are so powerful because this is the first thing we read.
So even if an article clarifies a bold or sensational headline statement, what everybody will remember best is the sensational title not the more measured article (if it is measured). This is why journalists and editors must be mature and responsible.
And that while assuming that people actually read the whole article. Because I even have doubts if everyone reads the complete articles.
Well it’s like good old Terry Pratchett once said:
‘People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.’- from The Truth.
I guess people don’t want to be told that a teacher ended his pupil’s life. The world doesn’t work like that for them. They see this situation and they come up with the story that fits in with how they think the world works, and the press, always keen to remain on the right side of the crowd’s narrative, help back it up.
But the truth is that horrible people exist in this world. They will stop at nothing to get what they want, and they will use every despicable trick in the book to get it.
Although I hate to make this political, I personally do think we’ve seen this sort of thinking in play before: when someone who people have accepted as having “good intentions” can’t possibly have done anything bad or horrendous, because that is not what they want to be told.
So It seems that Grei knows the whole story and she even knows for sure he tried to commit suicide.
It would be interesting to know if Grei has children and whether she would be first in line to have them thought and guided by people who have Tanti’s track record.
How exactly does the dead girl’s family’s financial situation change any of the facts that she was with her teacher in Dingli, at night, with alcohol and a large stock of painkillers.
How does any money anyone has impact the fact that he had pictures of her which a teacher (and possibly others) should not have.
How do their material possessions change their sorrow in the face of such hideous and untimely death? “If you cut me, do I not bleed?”
If she were dirt poor, how is the situation different except for the fact that who Lisa Marie was might have made her a more attractive target to a man like that?
They think the Zahras, and not the police, are prosecuting Tanti.
They already ‘know” the court has been bought off, even though they don’t know whose court will hear the case.
Tragic ignorance about an especially tragic case.
Perhaps if Winston Junior handed out cookies while reading the statement the journalists may have been more receptive to what was being said. He should have taken some tips from Kurt Farrugia.
That is what journalists have come to. They go where the cookies are.
The bottom line is that reporters and journalists were far, far better when there were no awards, no certificates and no University of Malta or MCAST diplomas in journalism.
I presume that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
Have just noticed typo. It should read primacy and recency. Sorry.
And the first one in the media that comes up is Xarabank’s Peppi.
He manages to get together the the most stupid lot in the audience and for some reason, I guess bullied without knowing it, the guests.
I am shocked at the reaction of so many people seeing nothing wrong with a TEACHER mishandling a 15-year-old. Seems everyone has forgotten that she is DEAD, giving her all the blame.
Maltese people and their rotten minds that cannot think other than for superficial things.I am saddened for my children mixing with this senseless bunch.
Li jissorprendini hu ghaliex il-qraba tal- vittma qabdu erba avukati primi f’parte civile. Nixtieq nghid ukoll li ma jaghmilx sens meta wiehed jghid li Erin ipprova jaghmel suwicidju ukoll. Ghax kieku tibqa tal post jew ma tohrogx mil-isptar wara biss gimgha u tidhol l-qorti miexi dritt! Apparti l-pozizzjoni fejn instab. Is-sens komun hafna drabi mhu komun xejn.
Erin Tanti is being prosecuted by the police and not by the family of his victim.
And before anyone jumps in to say that the case has yet yo be heard, yes, Lisa Maria Zahra was her teacher’s victim – and that was before he drove her to Dingli cliffs.
“When you know that a disproportionate number of people in Malta are stupid, ignorant, uninformed, uneducated and irrational, journalists have an even bigger responsibility and they should not take it lightly.”
Problem is there are a number of ‘journalists’ that fall into this category themselves.
This only proves the twisted reasoning of many, who are ready to excuse the ill behaviour of the accused.
I cannot find one tiny reason which can excuse him.
Are we to start accepting sexual behaviour between teachers and pupils, and accusing the girls of ‘tempting’ their teachers?
This type of anarchy only shows how corrupt and sick some can be at the expense of what is decent and proper.
We are living in a country of sick minds. How could they justify something so terrible? When these ladies were younger, say 15, did they lure some older man to their fantasies?
The family are not out to “destroy” him to seek justice for their daughter who HE destroyed.
What a sick, sick nation of imbeciles and shallow-minded people.
Not surprisingly there are lots of similarities in peoples’ reaction to this and to the New Year’s Eve double murder in Sliema.
The reason is envy.
Wealthy people are vehemently begrudged by most.
The fact that the girl came from a well-to-do background with a father in the news makes her even MORE of a target by these uneducated and spiteful people.
She is now their target for the very same reasons that she was Erin Tanti’s: the desire to see those you envy brought down in suffering.
Your description of ‘a disproportionate number of people in Malta’ applies equally to our local ‘journalists’.
Well said. That is what I had on my mind too. Journalistic levels in Malta leave much to be desired. Being incisive is not exactly their second nature. Standards are plummeting quickly, I’m afraid. Welcome the copy and paste generation.
There is an even sadder thing here, some of these posts are done by teachers. What is it they are defending? Him or themselves? If the girl did anything wrong (which I seriously doubt) it was the teachers duty to put her on the right track.
I believe that Erin Tanti is partly a result of Maltese society constantly defending and at times even encouraging this sort of behaviour by men.
Look at the way one of Tanti’s friends posted that Spiderman meme as a joke. Yes, a joke – about having sex with minors. It was a sort of wink-wink nudge at Tanti’s character, as in “I know you as this type of person who preys on underage girls, and isn’t it all hilarious?”
This sort of behaviour is a perverted symbol of masculinity amongst Maltese men Tanti’s age, and not a sign of a deeply disturbed psyche. What is more, they egg each other on because they know they can get away with it.
God forbid Africans and other foreigners run away from turmoil and seek asylum in Malta. They will find no sympathy or compassion for their suffering. There is no empathy for the mentally ill, desperately in need of help, who tie already-dead cats to pieces of wood.
But the moment a fellow Maltese drives one of his underage pupils to her certain death at Dingli Cliffs, it’s ‘Miskin, leave him alone!’
We are always telling girls to be careful and wary of men – but were are all the parents and mothers educating their sons to treat girls and women with respect?
It seems they don’t exist.
[Daphne – They do exist. But they are in the minority. And curiously, the mothers are getting worse, not better. You get the feeling sometimes that they are so jealous of any future and potential woman in their son’s life, that they raise their son to treat all women badly as a sort of pre-emptive vindictive strike.]
Grei Sciberras, to think that this person is as you quoted a “poor guy” shows that you either have no intelligence, or you have not been reading much about him, and I don’t mean only what has been written since this tragedy, but way before that.
He is a very disturbed person and needs to be locked up for many years. Just Google him and you will see for yourself. His plays were so depressing, his quotes, his mannerisms, the way he speaks as you can see in an interview he gave, all show you that he is a very odd troubled human being, who unfortunately chose this poor young girl to be his victim to carry out his final play, which I presume was his secret fetish in more ways then one.
‘erbgha avukati prima klassi’ out to destroy poor Erin.
The 21st century Manuel Dimech.
Grei seems to be missing quite a bit of grey stuff up there.
Those Facebook posts are mixed up as are the people who wrote them.
The girl in question comes from a ‘prominent’ family but so do thousands of others in Malta. What should we do? Blame them for being so to sort of justify the reason for her death? Nonsense – and the way she died has nothing to do with where she comes from. If the girl was ‘poor’ would we blame poverty as the reason for her death? What rubbish!
Daphne, the above posts on FB only show that there’s a new trend in Malta which is called: philosophising ignorance.
The person who’s saying ‘both had psychological problems and both tried to commit suicide’ doesn’t know what she is saying. Both does not justify the way this girl died, both does not justify Lisa having psychological problems, both does not justify Lisa Marie as suicidal, both does not qualify for any substance here.
Both has nothing to do with it. It’s all about the six accusations, this man is faced with.
The way I see it tells me, one person had serious psychological problems.
And no, we are not all identically vulnerable.
So your version of ‘both’ means absolutely RUBBISH. Each and everyone is an individual with an individual situation. How these people are thinking that both had everything in common is like saying, both are to blame and justice can not serve anyone.
And for the reasons above, the family are right to get a parte civile all the lawyers they felt they needed to get, because it is for the very same reasoning of the people behind those posts above, that they need the lawyers to appear for them – to avoid a repeat of the mentality as the above, repeating itself – it is not only dangerous, it is so warped, only those lawyers can do what needs to be done to justify that Lisa Marie is not ‘both’ but a person, a human being who sadly lost her life due to the incompetence of a man, her teacher, whose behaviour was not detected when it should have been.
I really cant understand the reasoning of these people they are putting the real victim as the accomplice to the perpetrator.
He is the guy who took her to Dingli and that is it.
He is the guy WHO WAS HER TEACHER who took her to Dingli cliffs.
The “let he who is without sin, cast the first stone
Ehe.
@the cons- just thinking that this child is dead because of the irresponsibility of her teacher makes me want to cast not only the first stone but also all the stones that follow.
Shame on all those who try to justify or excuse his crimes. It is disgusting how people try and excuse him by blaming it on her. It makes me sick.
Is the education minister still planning on going ahead and disrupting the education program of our children with his art program ?
Let me guess – there are many talented drama teachers who need the government to make their subject mandatory for them to be appreciated.
Has it occurred to anyone that students can stay after school to do drama if they so choose.
Is this how we are preparing our children to succeed in today’s competitive world.
Well i suppose they can afford to waste their children and have fun. All they have to do is support their political party and they will get all the opportunities denied to better deserving people.
Lets make sure we are the shit for brains country we already are for many more generations to come.