Mediawatch

Rear-Ended Reporting

rear_akkuzaMinister Mallia has justified the posting of army personnel at the entrance of ministries by claiming that extra security is needed. “Security from what?”, we felt obliged to ask, “Ze Germans?”. Well, as it happens, the immunity and safety of our representatives (on the opposition side, but who’s bothering with these details?) was actually threatened by a holder of a passport issued by the Bundesrepublik.

One of the big news items yesterday was that PN MPs Frederick Azzopardi and Censu Galea were involved in a freak traffic accident that ended up with them being hospitalised. For a few fleeting news minutes you got the impression that there might have been some political motivation behind the traffic accident since we got a description of someone barging into the honourable gentlemen’s (yes, there is a bit of tongue in cheek behind the use of that appelation) vehicle. The description was one of crash, insult, drive away. Why else would someone stop and insult two MPs (two for the price of one even) if not for some political motive?

Anwyays. It seems that a traffic incident involving members of parliament must have some form of “crimen laese majestatis” classification (crimes against the king) since the long arm of the law were apparently up all night searching for the perpetrator of this crash’n’run. Now I have no disrespect for messers Azzopardi and Galea and do hope that in the end their hospital visit was for a routine check-up and that they escape the affair unscathed but you do get the feeling that our political class are reserved some extra attention worthy of divas a little bit too often. Would the PCs of our realm have stayed up all night trying to get lucky finding an anonymous perpetrator (not so anonymous – how many Volvos with foreign number plates can there be on the island?) if it was you or me who were in the driving seat of the car that got rear-ended.

What? You don’t know what “rear-ended” means? Oh come on. You’re so two thousand and late. It means (apparently) that your car got barged into from behind (hence, rear-ended) by another in a not too comfy fashion. I had to compare MaltaToday’s report with that of the Times in order to come up with that explanation. Sorry but some jargon is not exactly up my old-fashioned street. Also, I was rather thrown by the idea that two of our MPs drove a car that also doubled as a stationery. So that is how Frederick and Censu make ends meet? Selling sharpeners and stencils after hours?

Here is the relevant part of the MaltaToday report just in case you think I jest. I’ve given it the Lorna treatment. Been a while…

This morning at around 8.00am the District Police arrested a German national who allegedly crashed into a car carrying two Nationalist MPs, Censu Galea and Frederick Azzopardi [Strong people these Germans. They crash into cars and then walk off. Unbreakable]. The accident happened yesterday at Triq ix-Xatt in Pietá.

The two MPs were in a Toyota driven by Azzopardi and their car was stationery near the KPMG offices [Investigators are out on the street right now trying to understand whether the MPs car was actually being used as stationery by employees of the KPMG firm or whether the car was actually doubling up as a stationery on wheels] when the German, driving a Volvo with foreign number plates [Have you ever tried manouevering a steering wheel using just number plates? It’s effing hard. I promise. Even for a German.], rear-ended [This gets confusing (see above). At first I thought the German did some weird manouevre other than use number plates to drive a car, then I sort of understood] and pushed the Toyota more then 10 meters [Let’s get finnicky shall we? First of all, “then” and “than”… right… you got that one. Next up. “Meters”. Electricity meters? Parking meters? Ah no…. American Style spelling of the measure equal to 100 centimetres] .

Following the incident, the man alighted [Did you know that the first recorded use of the word “alight” was in the General Prologue from the Canterbury Tales?] from his vehicle and hurled insults  at the two MPs. However by the time the police arrived on the scene, the man had driven away [having presumably un-alighted and applied his number plate driving skills].

Both Galea and Azzopardi were hospitalised and treated for slight injuries.

The search for the foreigner was on all night [They stayed up all night to Get Lucky] but it was not until this morning that the man was arrested at his residence in Pietá [Did you see that? Accident in Pietà, residence in Pietà, foreign number plates, and we spend all night to find him]. He is being kept by the police for further investigations and will be arraigned in court in the coming days.

Police Inspector Jason F. Sultana is leading the investigations.

Emissions

The Times reports a PQ about emissions by vehicles. 12,529 reports were made to a dedicated number and of these only 21 failed the emissions test. Someone, somewhere, is doing something wrong. Only this week cities in Europe suffered huge hikes in pollution levels due to the anomalous weather (cold at night, warm during the day) conditions. Paris was forced to reintroduce alternate number plate circulation in order to reduce the overall amount of emissions that had reached record levels. Photos such as the one below of the Tour Eiffel enveloped in a huge cloud of pollution went viral all over the net.

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A couple of days ago a report on one of the Maltese online papers mentioned that a new project in Mosta would not require too many impact studies but that a study was being drawn up as to the impact of such a project on the air. This led me to wonder why Malta gets to treat its towns and villages as though they each lay miles apart with a huge desert in between when the truth is that our tiny, densely populated, island is just one huge agglomeration. It’s not just that, last I heard there were more vehicles than persons on the island which puts the number of vehicles conservatively above the 350,000 mark. So why should only a proposed new shopping village in Mosta provoke the question of impact on the air? Where are we assuming that all the other cars will be when they are not being used for shopping in Mosta?

Luxembourg too had registered a hike in pollution levels though not at such an alarming rate as Paris. One of the reasons given for Luxembourg’s being spared the excesses is the fact that the vehicle population in Luxembourg is much more up to standard where emission levels are concerned. This is not surprising, given the high standard of living here you rarely see a car struggling to chug along while emitting all sorts of fumes. Let this not be an apologia for gas-guzzlers – no matter how up to scratch their technology is. The quicker we shift to cleaner sources of energy the better.

But that was not my point here. My point was mainly about that PQ and the fact that the figure of 21 vehicles failing the emissions test strikes me as very very wrong. As our government embarks on a project to transform the Salini coast road into a multi-lane race track you get the distinct feeling that insofar as transportation methods and environmental issues are concerned most of the planning is done by a troop of chimpanzees who have had most of their brains amputated for good measure.

Happy Saint Joseph’s Day!

Lidl politics

lidl_akkuzaThe new Lidl branch threw open its doors in Xewkija this weekend. The Gozitans turned up en masse – particularly after the “leak” that the first 100 customers would be able to buy a 399€ TV at the discounted price of 100€. I heard reports of traffic jams as well as unconfirmed reports of people sleeping outside the store in order to get in first on opening day. We are no longer surprised by this kind of news – Lidl knows what tickles the fancy of the Maltese public (and not just them – it’s popular across Europe) and serves it on a fake silver plate. One thing that Lidl does well is deliver. It’s not just a load of promise. It puts its money where its mouth is and gives you the bargain you go looking for.

The new generation of politicians who are currently riding the wave of discontent at the politics of austerity try their hardest to be the Lidl of the situation. They promise heaven on earth and exploit the fact that for a moment all the turkeys actually believe that Christmas can be banned. For ever. Having shed any semblance of values and principles, the key is to sell everything to everyone – at least the promise. Most of their problems begin to build up when everybody tries to cash his cheque at the same time. That is when deals with the devil end up being made – somebody somewhere must underwrite the impossible promises. And who cares if that somewhere turns out to be shaky Libyan governments, friendships with Ukrainian demi-despots on the cusp of dethronement and an opaque Chinese entity?

Italy’s young star is fading faster than Malta’s turk – mainly because the mass of critical elements in Italy work at a faster rate at exposing inconsistencies. Italy might have its share of apologists but the scam of the age of Berlusconi will not be brought up in order to justify in some way the farce that is Renzi’s new way. Malta, on the other hand, is still lost between the ridiculous statements about PN closet skeletons (tu quoque, so you have lost your right to ever speak, ever) and the ongoing finger pointing at the shamed clan who dared vote Labour for change (where are you now? No longer strutting your Taghna Lkoll Vote eh?). Everybody is guilty of something if you believe the columnists and that seems to mean that Muscat’s fairy-tale ride into the Paese dei Balocchi . Yes, Muscat gets a free ride with his Bowel Movement – free of the chains of criticism, free of any form of real form of institutional accountability.

How fitting then that Renzi and Muscat, the young dreamers of Europe, can both find a link to a Disney-an utopia. Watch Marco Travaglio do just that with Renzi here.


 

How they see dead people

death_akkuzaListening to French radio this morning (it could have been any radio really) I heard about the gigantic efforts deployed by China in order to locate the lost Malaysian airlines plane. At one point the Chinese PM was reported as saying how important it was for China to find the lost plane – because “we value human life”. I needed to stop and take this in. To me China and the Chinese government has always been a gargantuan entity that operates far beyond the value of human life. I mean this in the sense of what we have been used to read about in the news – huge projects that wipe away swathes of the population in certain regions without too much batting of eyelids.

The authoritarian attitude to human life was reflected in the run up to the Beijing  Olympics (as it has been, for what that matters, reflected in the Sochi run up as well as the Brasil World Cup). To hear the Chinese PM speak of the value of human life was new to me and a sort of reality check. Then there is the matter of the huge amount of resources being deployed (including satellites) to locate a wreck  (with all the respect that is due to those who passed away). There is a huge irony in all this – the Chinese megastate mobilising expensive resources to search for the dead because it apparently respects human life.

Taken from a wider angle there is also the matter of how long news can dwell on the death of a particular set of people because of the nature of their death – an airline tragedy – when in the event of deaths in similar numbers in other corners of the earth the news is reported as though it is routine. The currency of life and death in news value is certainly one that fluctuates.

end note: The accompanying image is a famous photo of Otto von Bismarck snapped surreptitiously while he was on his deathbed. It is believed to be one of the first paparazzo photos ever – as the morbidity of death makes the news. Read more about this here.

The truth, when they lie

lie_akkuzaThe World Wide Web turns 25 today. As Sir Tim Berners Lee makes a move to try to keep the “web we want”, the current state of affairs is such that the social media revolution is still the main motor behind the spread of the web worldwide. The availability of immediate information as well as the empowerment of citizens has gained momentum to the extent that the amount of data being exchanged about immediate events has increased exponentially.

Ellen De Generes’ selfie at the last Oscar Award ceremony threatened the whole infrastructure of twitter – an information superload. It’s not just the pink news that is doing it. Breaking world wide news is now seasoned with the input from literally millions of netizens – all giving their slant or take on what is going on. We are used to seeing major news sites asking for “on the ground” information – cue the BBC’s now standard box on a news item asking whether “you are on site” and whether you can provide immediate information.

The social media have also been at the core of the revolutions that swept across the Arab world and more recently in the Ukraine. Whether it is a natural disaster such as a tsunami or earthquake, or a human tragedy – a shootout, a crash – the social media is on the front-line. There is a problem though, and it is becoming more and more dangerous.

The lack of control over what is and is not published when it comes to netizen input means that a rumour or a conjecture can rapidly spread across the net and be treated as a truth. We are already familiar with fake deaths of stars that quickly go viral and before you know it the news is taken as being true. The problem is exacerbated when it comes to news from trouble zones such as we have recently seen in Syria or Ukraine and is with regard to crucial information such as the presence of snipers or attackers.

This problem is now being studied by researchers at five different European universities who are trying to develop an algorithm that filters online rumours and chooses the true (or potentially true) from the false.

Five European universities are working on a social media lie detector in an attempt to verify online rumors. The technology developed in the wake of the London riots is set to help not only journalists and the private sector, but also governments.

Researchers, led by Sheffield University in England, are cooperating on the system, which could automatically ascertain if a rumor can be verified and whether it originates from a reliable source. It will attempt to filter reliable factual information from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The project called PHEME is being funded by the European Union and has already been in development for three years. It is named after the Greek mythological character of Pheme, who was famed for spreading rumors. [REUTERS]

The filter will try to label information as being either speculation, controversy, disinformation or misinformation. The system will try and use three different factors to establish the accuracy of a nugget of information. It will examine the information itself (lexical, syntactic and semantic), and then cross-reference the information with a trust worthy data source and the dissemination of information.

In other words, PHEME promises to be the first frontier at combating online fraud and misconceptions although it will not entirely replace human judgement. The ultimate arbiter of what can or cannot be considered as potentially true will remain the gatekeepers at the newsdesks. What PHEME does is simplify their task – particularly as the new is live when it would be more time-consuming to follow leads – and provide a probability.ù

Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and Pratchett are all attributed different versions of the quote “A lie can travel half way around the world before the truth can put its shoes/pants/boots on.” With PHEME’s help the time gap might be shorter…

The truth, if I lie.

L’Express on PHEME

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The idiots among us

idiot_akkuza

“Quand j’entends, par exemple, madame Taubira dire qu’elle n’est pas au courant (du fond du dossier), elle nous prend pour des blaireaux. – Gilbert Collard.

One hot issue in French politics right now is that of Sarkozy’s tapped phone. It turns out that Sarkozy was being tapped while conversing with his lawyers and a huge fuss has been made about this – literally left, right and centre. Collard is a Front National representative and he was talking about France’s Justice Minister Mme Taubira who had claimed not to have known about the goings on. According to Collard, it is all a question of accountability and responsibility – Taubira’s portfolio means that police and fonctionnaires with the police and magistrates fall under her jurisdiction. “If she says that she was not aware”, Collard says, “then she is treating us like imbeciles”. Yep. “Blaireaux” means “badgers” but in street language it means idiots.

There’s much of that going around nowadays – politicians treating citizens as though they were idiots. Nothing new under the sun, only that it is becoming much more an “in your face” kind of treatment.

Last Sunday, one of Malta’s main newspapers carried a strongly worded editorial criticising Labour’s one year in government. Anyone who managed to read it would have been pleasantly surprised by the reality check being proposed on a number of fronts by the Sunday Times. A particular paragraph dealing with the impeachment proceedings against Judge Farrugia Sacco did not go down well with the person currently sitting in the institutional seat of Speaker of the House. For the benefit of the members of the public who like me prefer not to pay for the fare on offer on the online papers here is the offensive paragraph in question:

“Once that commission (note: “for the Administration of Justice”) reached a conclusion that was obviously inconvenient for the government, Dr Muscat and the Labour-appointed speaker went out of their way to ensure he (note: Judge Farrugia Sacco) would not be impeached before he reaches retirement age in the summer”. (STOM Editorial – 9 March 2014)

It so happens  that the person currently occupying the post of speaker did not take too kindly to the editorial. Free as he was to disagree with its conclusions – and point out his disagreement publicly if he so liked – he decided to take it one step further. Labour-appointed speaker Anglu Farrugia has demanded that the Sunday Times withdraw what he described as “serious allegations against him ‘as a person and as a Speaker'” and threatened to take legal action should the Times not give the withdrawal equal prominence as its allegation.

Reality check: this is the two thousand and fourteenth year of the christian era. 2014. For the second time during the Labour-led legislature, a labour-appointed public official has decided to use the parliament and its structures as a means to silence criticism. Joseph Muscat had earlier taken exception to a statement by opposition leader Simon Busuttil and transformed the parliament into a mini-jury in order to get the man to shut up (only to scuttle off to watch a football match rather than be present for the proceedings that ensued).

Heaven forbid, of course, that we insinuate in any way that members of parliament and its speaker are not within their rights and prerogatives whenever they try to defend themselves and their reputation. Having said that the zero-sum game that Farrugia is engaging with the Times is not a defence of a prerogative. It would not take too much of a genius for even the leak-recipient that is the Times to notice that the chain of events leading to the postponement of the possible impeachment smacks highly in the very least of incompetence for want of trying. It would be the duty of a vehicle of the press that notices such a lacuna in the mechanisms of our institutional representative structures and processes to point such a lacuna out. It’s a fair comment – accuse it of bias if you like (bias? the Times?) but do not gag it.

Using the “position of Speaker” in order to throw unnecessary weight around is an unfair attempt at gagging the fourth estate. Such cases have been dealt with long ago in real liberal democracies. The freedom of the press and its right to point out deficiencies in democratic representation has long been encapsulated and spelled out in the jurisprudence of the aforementioned liberal democracies. We even had our own moment of glory before the European Court of Human Rights with the famous  Demicoli vs Malta – where the Court found that the requirements of impartiality must always be preserved whenever the House felt its privilege was violated.

Incidentally, one of the two members of parliament to raise the original breach of privilege back in the eighties was the Joe Debono Grech. Another of the old-timer appointments to token but remunerated positions by this meritocratic government (we also learnt recently, among others, of Alex Sciberras Trigona’s and Joe Grima’s appointment as envoys to World Trade and Tourism Organisations). The revamped (Daily Mail inspired) MaltaToday reported yesterday that “Debono Grech refused to stay for a public consultation meeting for the Gozo minister when he learned that he was not to be placed at the head table.” Not much of a twist on the learning curve there either.

And finally, for something completely different and pythonesque, since we are on the subject of institutional disfigurement we might as well mention the news that Minister Manuel Mallia’s minions are organising government official activities in the very impartial venues of PL Clubs. Yes, that’s Kazini tal-Labour. Here’s how the Times reported the matter (my bold):

Government officials employed with the Home Affairs Ministry’s customer care unit have been detailed to attend meetings with the public organised at PL clubs located in the minister’s constituency. According to newspaper adverts titled ‘Always close to you’ (Viċin Tiegħek Dejjem), Manuel Mallia will be holding a series of meetings with the public in the coming weeks in seven localities in the districts from which he was elected last year. Without giving details of the actual place where Dr Mallia will be meeting the public, the adverts state that two days before each meeting, “people from the ministry’s customer care will be present at the respective locality’s Labour Party Club to meet the public”. (Times Online – 11th March)

What will the excuse be this time? That we are saving public money by using venues kindly provided by the Labour Party? That the Minister did not know and was not aware?

Blaireaux anyone?

 

“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.” – Thomas Jefferson