Saviour stands up to be counted

Joseph Muscat and I have a lot in common because we're both scions of rabid Mintoffjani.

If Saviour Balzan were in any doubt at all that Malta Today has long since become the English-language newspaper that the Labour Party always wanted, couldn’t produce and now doesn’t even have to pay for (as far as we know), it is the way his staff member James Debono has been made the target of a virulent internet attack by his newspaper’s readers.

Debono’s crime? He did what so many others have done elsewhere and wrote about the crassness of Joseph Muscat’s statement, such as it was, on the North African crisis. And he had the temerity to suggest that there is much about Muscat which worries him.

Articles on the Malta Today site receive few comments, and they’re always from the usial suspects, including Jo Said – remember him? – using the nick Knocker and peddling the same sad obsessions that rendered him a figure of fun in the 2008 elections.

But James Debono’s piece brought in 70 comments, most of them abusive, including (and this is typical Labour thinking) calls for his editor to give him “a warning” for being “so one-sided”. Clearly, they were shocked and irate that ‘their’ newspaper had run an article critical of Dear Leader.

James Debono suddenly has the tiniest fraction of an inkling of what it is like to be me. But, this being his first experience of being targeted by the Labour machine, he is clearly perturbed by the “rabid” nature of the response.

Blow them a raspberry, James, and let them eat each other alive. Take it from me: never expect commonsense, rational argument, or coherent sentences from people who were dumb enough to vote for Mintoff, KMB, Sant and now, that prat Muscat.

If you want consolation, one day I’ll show you some of the comments that come in to this blog and don’t get uploaded because they’re the stuff of police reports. The violence, the intolerance and the inability to understand that democracy is not ‘say nice things about Labour or die’ would be unbelievable to somebody who, unlike me, did not see The Times building set on fire with its employees still trapped inside (my sister’s father-in-law was one of them).

Malta Today is a wholly anti-government newspaper that has found itself shoring up Labour by default because its two owners, Saviour Balzan and Roger de Giorgio, have nothing but contempt for Lawrence Gonzi and the Nationalist Party (sentiments which I believe have long been reciprocated, hence the problems).

But when one lone journalist in that miserable den of Lord of the Rings fans and Che Guevara wannabes decides to write what he thinks about Joseph Muscat, all hell breaks loose and he’s ‘one-sided’.

Saviour Balzan and Roger de Giorgio should remember that Malta Today is not an opinion column. It is a newspaper. So the minute it becomes a vehicle for their own personal opinion – and that minute came a long time ago – the newspaper acquires the same status as, say, the newspapers owned by the political parties. We reinterpret all their coverage in the context of the owners’ prejudices and biases.

I know that Saviour Balzan is dying to have a go at Joseph and the Dream Machine. There is no way on earth that he can possibly take that lot of old bats and clowns seriously, not going on the little I know of him. But the little I know of him also tells me that he is prepared to hold back on what he really thinks about Labour because he really, really wants Lawrence Gonzi to lose the next election.

And so he has ended up with a Labour newspaper, which he still continues to peddle as politically independent, long after it has lost of semblance of it.

You would think that Saviour, now that the stork has finally brought him a baby when his contemporaries are becoming grandparents (and good luck to him – and to the baby, who will certainly need it in those circumstances), would have calmed down and stopped being so bitter and resentful about things. But I guess not. When I saw him the day before yesterday in my favourite Valletta coffee-shop, he was huddled over in a corner, taking confession from a portly gent with a hangdog look and a grudge. That sort of thing is his lifeblood.

Malta Today’s – the print version – top story today is that the Nationalist Party is planning a campaign to target Karmenu Vella, and that I am part of this campaign and ‘directly linked to Castile’ because I got information from the Nationalist Party’s library and information service, Informa.

What a set of cretins.

The Nationalist Party’s library, which is not a library at all but an archive, is one of the best research resources in the country. It is used by people of all political stripes and for all sorts of purposes, against payment. If Malta Today doesn’t use it, then that is Malta Today’s loss.

When I want an archived copy of The Times, I go to the archives at Allied Newspapers. When I want an archived copy of The Malta Independent, I ring the office. And when I want a back issue of In-Nazzjon, I go to the PN library. I even go to the PN library when the newspapers I need are somewhere else, like the National Library in Valletta. This is because the crack team at the PN library goes through every newspaper every day and enters the stories, reports and opinion columns into a data-base by date, newspaper, writer and subject. So they are usually able to give you the date when a story appeared and then you can toddle off armed with that date to the National Library or The Times or The Malta Independent and save yourself a whole lot of hassle physically trawling through endless bound tomes of newspapers.

The Tunny Net smuggling story about Karmenu Vella and Johnny Dalli was reported only by In-Nazzjon at the time (because, jahasra, Malta Today didn’t yet exist), so OBVIOUSLY I went and got it from the PN archive. I would have to be very stupid indeed to take the more protracted course of action of going to the National Library and going through four years’ worth of copies of In-Nazzjon to find the right date.

As for the photographs of Karmenu Vella, I got them all from his very own Facebook albums: the horse’s arse, so to speak.

I guess Saviour Balzan and that foul and bitter person, Matthew Vella, are supremely teed off because this is one trick they were forced to miss due to their ‘let’s not damage Labour so that Lawrence Gonzi loses’ editorial stance. They should have been the ones telling their readers the real story about Karmenu Vella, not me. That was their job, not mine. They’re a newspaper. I’m not.

And when they saw the interest generated by those Karmenu Vella posts on this blog, it reminded them just how hamstrung they are by having to suck up to Labour.

They’re missing out on the real juice.

People are more interested in the Opposition now than they are in the government, because they’ve become increasingly aware that in two years’ time, this is going to be their government.

But for Malta Today, the story is not that Joseph Muscat has dug Dom Mintoff’s minister of industry from 1980 out of his political grave to write an electoral programme for 2018 – a full four decades on. The story is not to ask whether this is Joseph Muscat’s idea of a moviment gdid for a generazzjoni gdida.

No, the story is that Daphne is targetting Karmenu Vella because she is linked to the PN and got hold of a back issue of In-Nazzjon from – SURPRISE! – the Nationalist Party library.

Perhaps Saviour Balzan needs to be reminded of the days when he spent his weekends protesting against the regime of which Karmenu Vella was a key and prominent part. But Malta Today’s memory apparently stretches no further back than when he was tourism minister under Sant in 1996.

Quite frankly, Joseph Muscat, Saviour Balzan and Roger de Giorgio deserve each other. But poor old James Debono, stuck in that morass of bitchy axe-grinders, does not deserve to be tainted with their reputation for bitter prejudice.