And So We Speak Out

Yesterday, something excellent happened.

Speak held its first event at university. Speak is a student organisation, a collaboration between three university student media organisations: Insite Malta, The Third Eye and The Yuppie. The idea behind it is to create an open space that encourages discussion and healthy debate about important issues amongst the student body.

Caroline Muscat from The Shift News was their guest yesterday. The event took the form of a discussion about media in Malta and youth’s participation, and this was what made it special and so good.

Ms Muscat began by giving a bit of background information about The Shift and its mission. The Shift has it all in its name – it is a shift away from political party owned media, an independent pen that aims to hold power to account.

Journalism is in a symbiotic relationship with society. It is there to protect it, warn it and inform it. Without it, we wouldn’t know what is going on around us, not only on a locally, but also globally. Journalists are there to challenge authority, push it into shape, pressure it to do things as they are meant to be done. Working for media run by a political party is not journalism. On the contrary, it is an exact contradiction in terms. It is being a propagandist or a public relations officer. Being a journalist means holding power to account, and by doing that, you keep the fourth pillar of democracy strong and untainted.

A group of students by the protest memorial
 calling for justice for Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Politics is a religion in Malta. People are, to use the phrase my aunt Daphne Caruana Galizia had once used, ‘political fangirls’. This is extremely frustrating because when people are blinded by party colour, they see the world through its filter. They don’t see reason. They don’t think. Perhaps the worst part of this is that it carries down the generations and many young people are consequently the same. It’s as if there are still cavemen roaming this tiny rock in the Mediterranean. They adopt the ‘us against them’ attitude, and it’s tribalistic.

What’s worst of all, however, is not the brainwashed portion, but the part of society who know that what is going on is wrong and refuse to acknowledge that it is their responsibility to speak out. Some people act as if my aunt’s murder is old news because it happened a year ago. It is not. My aunt was a journalist killed because she held power to account so courageously and so correctly. Her assassination is still as raw in my mind as it was the day it happened and I haven’t yet been able to fully absorb that it really did happen, that it wasn’t a nightmare, that she is gone. I’ll never see her again. But it’s more than that, because Daphne wasn’t just my aunt. She was one of the only journalists who stood up for my rights.

I get angry because Daphne stood up for the rights of the apathetic, too, and she died doing so. My cousin Andrew once said that he was never prouder of her than the day she was killed and ‘never more humbled by the example she gave [him], [his] brothers and the world than the day she forced her enemies to kill her, rather than abandon her work’.

Don’t take things at face value. Be critical and question everything, even the seemingly obvious. Just because all looks fine and no wars are bursting through the streets, and just because you are promised a greater stipend, it does not mean that all is well. Money is a filthy demagogic tool when used in such a way. Show them that we are not seduced by it.

Not everyone of our generation is apathetic, of course. It would be unfair to say so because it isn’t true. Over the past year, I’ve come to know a few individuals around my age who feel strongly about the injustice and madness of the situation. One of them was prepared to spend the night guarding the protest memorial in Valletta a couple of months back because it is cleared twice a day (at the time it was happening mostly at night) on orders of the authorities, and they did so. They all write publicly about everything that’s going on. Others make speeches at protests and vigils. I truly admire their strength and determination.

The circumstances under which we all met may be horrible – the assassination of a journalist in our European democracy, and that journalist happening to be my aunt – but I try to think of it differently: We all met because of our mutual desire for justice and a return to beauty in our country, all of us still young, and in that alone, there is hope.