Labour Party media targets critics at least 48 times less than four weeks after general elections

After a gruelling electoral contest in which everyone claims to have run a positive campaign, the Labour Party began its fourth consecutive legislature by intensifying its targeting of critics across the board.

While both parties are guilty of poisoning public discourse with partisan media that is focused largely on tearing down “the other side” and filling in the blanks with praise for their party’s representatives, the Labour Party continues to elicit scrutiny due to the its intensive, sustained, and methodical efforts to discredit critics.

An analysis of the last few weeks of coverage published on the Labour Party’s primary media outlet, ONE News, reveals that the Opposition, activists, and the independent press were collectively targeted at least 48 times.

For the purposes of this article, we looked at both ONE’s actual website and its Facebook page. The total count does not consider the party’s other platforms, including its flagship television and radio stations. The period of interest covers 30 May – 22 June.

Overall, the propaganda follows a consistent formula, aggressively homing in on the target’s perceived faults and attempting to gaslight readers into processing criticism as an attack instead of calling out ONE’s reporting as an attack in its own right.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of ONE’s propaganda capital was deployed to discredit its eternal political rival, the Nationalist Party. Out of the 48 entries analysed for this article, 32 of them were dedicated to either amplifying a known issue within the PN or attempting to create one.

By repeating keywords like “hypocrisy”, “extremists”, and “factions” over and over, the intent is to direct the public’s attention away from the government’s failures, pointing eyeballs towards the Nationalist Party’s problems instead. The tactic helps cement the notion that the Opposition is made up of incompetent people who cannot be trusted to govern.

Though senior Nationalist Party figures like Adrian Delia and Beppe Fenech Adami have been doing the rounds on ONE’s channels for years, younger would-be MPs are also fair game.

One example of this was how the Labour Party took a sudden interest in the political career of former PN candidate and activist Luke Said after he declared that the party had sidelined him during the general elections, another easy swipe at the PN leader’s credibility.

While it is entirely true to state that Said’s brand of grassroots politics simply does not align with the PN’s attempts to secure as broad a tent as possible, it is equally crucial to point out that the framing of ONE’s narrative revolves largely around what they think this says about Borg’s leadership.

Though Malta’s media standards are low enough for the public to accept the existence of party stations as a fact of life rather than as an aberration that is unique to the country, ONE’s strategy insidiously lumps all other critics within the same basket as the Nationalist Party.

In ONE’s vocabulary, there is no difference between the Nationalist Party, civil society activists, and media outlets which do not simply report what is happening but also dare to criticise wherever necessary.

Five other entities or groups were targeted: anti-corruption NGO Repubblika, this website, the Daphne Foundation, Partit Momentum, and two key individuals involved in the hospitals concession inquiry.

Despite a notable decline in public visibility and influence, Repubblika continues to serve as a useful bogeyman for the Labour Party, with both former and current representatives of the organisation being singled out whenever they voice their concerns publicly.

Former Repubblika President Robert Aquilina, for example, was mentioned at least eight times in the past month alone, second only to Opposition Leader Alex Borg (24 mentions).

Aquilina, who now heads the local chapter of Italian anti-corruption watchdog Fondazione Falcone, has earned himself the horrifying honour of being targeted in a manner which distinctly resembles the same kind of dehumanising treatment that Daphne Caruana Galizia was subjected to.

Repubblika’s lawyer, Jason Azzopardi, is also a regular target of systemic efforts to discredit his claims about widespread corruption within government.

The Shift has been the target of various forms of intimidation, coercion, and financial pressures by the government, the Labour Party, and anyone else whose wrongdoing was exposed on our site.

Over the past few weeks, ONE’s explicit references to this website were all in the context of blurring the lines between the professional duty of every journalist to call a spade a spade, the activist’s need to direct attention towards pressing issues, and the rival politician’s desire to unseat the incumbent.

In particular, the Labour Party appeared to take issue with an analysis of outgoing Speaker of the House Anġlu Farrugia’s career, our reporting on Carmelo Abela’s nomination for the same seat, and columns published by Andrew Borg Cardona and Paul Bonello.

During Robert Abela’s tenure as Prime Minister, attacks against this website also intensified, leading The Shift’s founder and editor, Caroline Muscat, to file a defamation suit against the Prime Minister over his baseless claim that “90%” of what this website publishes is “fake news”.