Who wants a free press, anyway?

During the Cold War President Reagan told a joke about three dogs discussing their lives. The American dog said he had his owner well trained: “When I am hungry I just bark and he gives me meat.” The Polish dog asked: “What’s meat?” The Russian dog asked: “What’s bark?” Thence, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, I found myself in Moscow, addressing about 100 English-speaking journalists on the meaning of a free press. In other words, the freedom to bark. Gorbachev (he wasn’t called President at the time) wanted a free press. Surprisingly, the vast majority of journalists didn’t. The thought that anybody could write critically of the Party or the government appalled them: in short, they were communists themselves and they would brook no criticism of either. My job was to ease them into the idea, gently. The three newspapers in Moscow, at that time, werePravda (Truth), Izvestia(News), and the Moscow News, which was a Party propaganda newspaper, written in English and then translated, world-wide. This was Gorbachev’s favourite. He took its editor-in-chief to be his press secretary, then brought the Prague correspondent of Izvestia to replace him, and I was drafted in (temporarily) as managing editor and head of news. After a first week planning the relaunch of an “unfettered” newspaper, I tried to explain to the journalists – native Russians and an astonishing number of westerners who had migrated to Moscow to pursue and promote “real Communism” – what I was doing. They hated it. So they hated me. One of them shouted: “You, Mr Revel Barker, are personally responsible for bringing about the downfall of the Soviet Socialist system.” The others applauded. I smiled and thanked him, but said that, though it may have been the greatest thing anybody had ever accused me of, I thought that Gorbachev ought to share at least some of the credit. When he persisted, I asked him to type it, on headed notepaper, so when I went home I could pin it to the pub wall and never need to buy a drink for the rest of my life. Why am I writing this (history) today? Because many newspaper readers in Malta – where, thankfully, we have a mostly free press – think the same way as those indoctrinated hacks in Moscow. We live in a country which, to the world outside, is officially considered to be corrupt, operating illegally, laundering money – effectively (and this was news to me) supporting international terrorism – to the extent that it is grey-listed with the likes of Syria, Zimbabwe and Uganda. But mention that, and the brainwashed apparatchiks are at the keyboard in a flash. It is wrong, wrong, WRONG!!!!! – just to say it. When it’s me, a non-voter, I am apparently a mouthpiece of the opposition, writing what “PN misfits” have dictated to me. That, of course, is Horlicks (with a B). It is difficult to write positively about this government, because there is so little that’s positive to say about it. Oh yes: it is spending millions on renovating our state schools (presumably it was the PN that had allowed them to crumble). That’s something positive. It may not allow a “farmer” to build a stone “tool-shed” (with a parapet and windows) in the middle of a field in Qala… that would be positive. It may finish the relaying of the road up from the harbour, abandoned since November (that will be positive, if it happens). Or finish the five-year job of connecting Nadur with the ferry port. There you have it: you are reading a well-balanced piece. In a way, the PL hackery should be pleased that its party gets so much attention. Nobody writes about the PN opposition because nobody can find it. You can’t write negatively about a negative. Which brings me back to Moscow, where, of course, there was also no opposition. Under previous government many of its critics had been jailed, some tortured, some mysteriously disappeared, and some were assassinated. Government officials had operated with – what’s the word? Oh yes – “impunity”. Gorbachev introduced the world to the word Glasnost. It meant increased openness and transparency in government in the USSR. It described his commitment to allow Soviet citizens to publicly discuss the problems in the system. It didn’t last long but it was, sort of, what we have here. The problem here is the huge number of people who don’t like it and can’t take it. #