Robert Arrigo has accused Bernard Grech of lying to the public and making his party’s executive “look like idiots”, saying the Nationalist Par
PN leader Bernard Grech has denied claims by his former deputy that he lied over a report into Naxxar mayor Anne Marie Muscat Fenech Adami’s conduct.
Rob
The media arms on opposite sides of the political arena have requested intervention in a constitutional case filed by Lovin Malta challenging a law that allows such party stations to bypass the principle of impartiality.
A provision under the Broadcasting Act, namely the proviso to Article 13, allowed the broadcasting watchdog to “close an eye” on the manner of operation of party-owned stations, considering the general output of programmes “together as a whole.”
At the time when that law came into effect, the government of the day had argued that party-owned stations, with their essentially “partisan message,” would eventually balance each other out.
More than 21,000 people have had their personal information leaked on the dark web by cyber criminals who hacked in to the PN s computer system.
Files including names, addresses, ID cards and, in some cases, phone numbers were published on a hackers’ forum in recent days after a ransomware attack last month.
The file was labelled in such a way to suggest the people whose data was leaked are either current or former
tesserati (paid-up members
).
Last month, hackers had threatened to leak “valuable” Nationalist Party documents unless the party agreed to “communicate and cooperate” with them.
Leader Bernard Grech had said in an interview that the party would not negotiate with cyber criminals.
The assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia in 2017 sent shockwaves throughout Malta, setting off a political earthquake that saw the eventual toppling of a prime minister and the spotlight firmly fixed on imperilled press freedoms.
More than three years on from the investigative journalist’s murder, the aftershocks continue to rattle the foundations of the Maltese state as calls for reform of the country’s institutions gain momentum.
Now a legal bid to disentangle political control over Malta’s media and declare the perceived bias of party-owned broadcasters unconstitutional is fast becoming the latest political faultline to open up on the Mediterranean island.