University of Malta’s Media Department head calls government’s attempt to force registration of ‘news websites’ “ridiculous and despotic”

Published: February 17, 2017 at 7:50pm

Gorg Mallia, head of Department of Media and Communications in the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences at the University of Malta, has ripped to shreds the government’s plans to force “news” websites to register with its Department of Information.

He wrote on his Facebook page yesterday evening: “It’s a ridiculous, despotic measure that has been ridiculed by the literature and makes the government look autocratic in ways that it really REALLY should not even be considering going there.”

Mallia had earlier uploaded an angry cartoon, saying that he drew it after reading the government’s new bill on media and defamation.

Owen Bonnici, the Minister of Justice who is the promoter of the bill, and Kurt Farrugia, the government’s communications chief, both pounced immediately, with the government’s communications chief dissing all dissenting opinion and one commenter pointing out to him that it is a little bit presumptuous and arrogant to dismiss the views of the university’s head of media and communications when the subject under discussion is media and communications.

The government’s head of communications says in this exchange that the requirement for news and current affairs websites to register themselves with the government of Malta “is a measure for news outlets to be able to have an editor and be recognised as a registered accredited news website”. Accredited by the government of Malta! The situation is so absurd that I find myself compelled to break my own rules about exclamation marks. Where in the democratic world are news websites or even newspapers “accredited” by the government?

Newspapers have to be registered with the government of Malta, yes – but that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing which should be applied to websites. The obligatory registration of newspapers with the government is an anachronism from the colonial era. It should be binned, not extended to other media.

The point that people seem to be missing – though one commenter in this exchange has got it – is that the sole purpose of registration of news/current affairs websites is to be able to strip people writing for unregistered sites of their right at law to protect their sources. This is actually written into the bill, and it is the only distinction there will be between registered and unregistered sites, which means that it is the reason why they have dreamed up this registration.

So far, the government has been seriously frustrated by the fact that the law empowers those who work in the media, or who contribute, to protect their sources completely. The government’s immense frustration in this regard hit the news this time last year when Pawlu Lia, a lawyer working for Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi in the case he instigated against me, The Police vs Daphne Caruana Galizia, asked the court to rule that I should be divested of my right to protect my sources because I am not a journalist.

The court ruled to the contrary, saying that not only am I a journalist, but that the law on the protection of sources in media reports does not even mention journalists.

The Energy Minister, Chris Cardona, now has the same problem. Though he is going about town saying that my story is a pack of lies and while he is planning to perjure himself four times over in four different law suits, he knows that I do have a source because he knows he was at the FKK Acapulco.

I have said already that I will neither register myself with the government’s Department of Information, nor will I disclose my sources. If the court jails me for non-disclosure of sources under this autocratic new law, the government will find itself with another national and international outcry on its hands, which is hardly what it needs right now.

But with luck, they’ll be booted out of office before they can get their tyrannical law through parliament, and even if they do get it through, a new government can repeal it soon after. But we all have to screw our heads on straight and make sure that there is a new government because this one simply isn’t safe.