What was Aleander Balzan doing at the PANA Committee hearing yesterday?

Yesterday afternoon, four journalists spent around two hours with the PANA Committee – except that one of them is not a journalist, despite being the registered editor of the Labour Party’s television station. Aleander Balzan, a Labour Party employee, thinks and behaves like a party functionary, and there is no doubt that his loyalty to his party comes before his loyalty to his audience and the job of journalism.

The other three were me, Ivan Camilleri from the Times of Malta, and Matthew Vella, who edits Malta Today. Aleander Balzan contributed nothing to the discussion, is completely unable to express himself in English – not only because of the language, but because he can’t form coherent thoughts, as he seems to have trouble expressing himself in Maltese, too.

And to make matters infinitely worse, he seemed completely unaware of what was required of him, and took his petty partisan battles into the room with him, bringing ‘proof’ in the form of Facebook print-outs that Ivan Camilleri “works for the Nationalist Party”, picking arguments and not saying anything about the subjects under review, but instead bleating on at length, in his mumbling voice, about Beppe Fenech Adami.

The committee chairman’s immediate response, when Balzan finally wound up, was “But Mr Fenech Adami is not in the Panama Papers, is he?” And that was the end of that.

This is what Werner Langen, the PANA Committee chairman, meant when he said following the press conference at the end of it all, that “the journalists gave us some problems”.

You can’t take those bogans anywhere and expect them to know how to behave. They are unaware of what is required of them in any given situation outside their partisan political minefield.

And another thing: Labour MEPs Miriam Dalli, Alfred Sant and Marlene Mizzi didn’t even bother to show up. The Nationalist MEPs – Roberta Metsola, David Casa and Therese Comodini Cachia – were there.

The man who controls Super One news has the temerity to talk about ‘hate’ and ‘attacks’ and to decide what is and isn’t journalism. And he will have to look up ‘temerity’ before he can work out what this means.