Scandalmongers

In his semantic book, The Republic, Plato makes Socrates relates a story he heard about Leontius, son of Aġlaion:

On his way up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, he noticed the bodies of some criminals lying on the ground, with the executioner standing by them. He wanted to go and look at them, but at the same time he was disgusted and tried to turn away. He struggled for some time and covered his eyes, but at last the desire was too much for him. Opening his eyes wide, he ran up to the bodies and cried, “There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on this lovely sight.”

Why am I relating this story? Because I’m sick and tired of our media’s kerfuffle about the health minister but cannot help following it closely. My reason is overwhelmed by my unworthy desire. Our media does not only cater for our voyeuristic appetites it lives on them by perpetuating and constantly provoking it. It is become the symbiotic parasite of our bad habits. There you are, curse you, feast yourselves on these disgusting symbol of our decadence.

So what if the minister was convicted of a minor crime close to three decades ago? And so what if she’s a drunkard? Do these things impede her from doing her job properly? If not just leave her the fuck alone!

I suppose it is too much to expect decent limits from the growing tabloid mentality of our media. I’m starting to suspect a baboon’s foot in the Sunday Time’s tactics of bombardment and character assassination. It’s starting to appear as some kind of smokescreen at the least, or worse, propaganda staged as rally for freedom. What does revealing these facts to the public have to do with the good of the public? Why are we being used as pawns in battles of hegemony and power? You want to embarrass the president for his so called mastery of intricate cocooning and the Gesamtkunstwerk of his cabinet. What gives you the right to abuse our ignorance?

We’ve been suffering scandalmongering of our independent media for quite sometime now; the superficial bunch of self-indulgent syndicated columnists who writes strings of dull pieces in awkward and unconvincing similes they confuse with depth. The Sunday Times especially has fallen under the throes of rococo fabulist with cross-stitched logic that convinces themselves that they are guardians of our liberty.

What they are doing to our minister of health has hightailed into gross violation of individual human rights. It is little beyond bad taste in the name of freedom of speech. Nobody expects journalism to be pure science of fairness, or the core of ethnicity; but there has to be self-limiting considerations for the sake of national pride if nothing else. Why should journalists be absolved from the values of civility that the rest of us are compelled to abide with in dealing with each other. Are they not taught in their training that communication is what makes us human, and hence can never be entirely distinguished from ethics?

It is time our courts of law break the false autonomy of freedom of speech fundamentalism that seems to think it is above all other civil values. The media must be reminded that there are certain bounds that cannot be crossed against individual rights. The Sunday Times must be held criminally accountable for the possession of the health minister’s personal stolen medical records. The court must remember that the newspapers caters for libels, and sometimes pursue scandalous cases with a calculated risks of return from the sales. So it try to devise punitive measure that take that into consideration.

The challenge here is to recover the loss philosophical foundation, which has left modern journalism unfit to account for proper values of decency. It now up to the High Court to remind them and all other who harbour such degenerate practices that we are still a civil society. We didn’t struggle for freedom of speech from autocratic institutions of afore to see our gains being trivialised and turned on their head for private gains of corporative investments.

I began with a philosopher and so I’ll close with another. Arthur Schopenhauer once sarcastically wrote that if you really want to know how you feel about a person, take note of the impression an unexpected letter from him makes on you when you see it on your doormat. Change that into a newspaper and you’ll get an idea of the disgust I felt when the copy of The Sunday Times with a second headlines in a row of more revelations about the minister’s personal life. My only comfort is that when our subscription expires in two and half months to go I shall not be renewing it. To hell with them and their glorified tabloid mentality.