Now the Prime Minister is even running away from Malta Today

Miriam Dalli of Malta Today used to be extremely close to the government’s head of communications, Kurt Farrugia. That’s her leaning on his back in the photograph below, taken three years ago. The other man is the Prime Minister’s chauffeur.

But this is what she tweeted this morning. If the Prime Minister is now even running away from Malta Today, the situation has reached an impasse.

Older journalists will remember that as the 1998 general election approached, Prime Minister Alfred Sant, for whom Joseph Muscat was working already at the time, had done exactly the same thing. He either avoided journalists completely or he called them to press conferences and instructed them that no questions would be allowed. He boycotted some journalists and news media altogether.

I got so mad about this that I organised a declaration of protest by journalists, wrote it up and then spent two days ringing people up and driving from one home or office to another, collecting their signatures. Email wasn’t used back then and mobile phones were basic.

Journalists, cameramen and photographers from all news media signed – including Labour voters and people who produced news discussion shows for the government-controlled TVM. There was a big fuss about it – we didn’t just sit back and let the Prime Minister get away with it. It was one of the many reasons why Sant went on to lose the general election: back then people didn’t just accept a situation in which the Prime Minister hid from journalists or insulted them. He looked really bad doing it.

Somewhere I still have a copy of that statement with all its signatures of protest. Newspapers were not on line back then, but the news reports, if somebody can find them, draw an interesting parallel between what Muscat is doing today and what his boss did 19 years ago.