July 1999 - Qawra, Malta

Last Saturday's Castille debacle

Your paper's reportage of the Castille debacle, Saturday TMI 24 July 1999, tickled my fancy, no end.

As this issue is becoming quite tedious, I decided to examine the political correctness of your newspaper's reporting layouts of these incidents. Just as one may draw many conclusions on people from their body language, likewise, inferences may be drawn from reporting layouts.

In your front page you zealously split the area in two and predictably reported the Opposition on the left and the Government on the right hand side of the space allowed for the articles. The journalist's name was displayed character-wise in the precise centre. The balance of the reportage was presented on page 3 and page 8 for the Opposition and the Government respectively. Space was devoted as follows:
 

A superficial interpretation of the above statistics might indicate that the reportage was pro-government. But, given that the front page dual-article was situated left of centre of the page and that Opposition's ensuing article was on page 3 as opposed to the Government's on page 8, I concluded that the reportage had definite covert leftist inclinations.

Believe it or not, the total area allocated to this debacle exceeded two full pages. I propose, that if this matter were to crop up again, you should ignore it and instead stimulate us intellectually with two pin-up photos from your archive of Valeria Marini's visit……however, not her photos with Minster Zammit Dimech to avoid all bias.

A final word of caution: the onerous task of examining newspapers' reporting layouts should only be conducted by neurotic politically die-hard adults on hot Saturday afternoons, if precluded from going to the seaside. Inferences made before ingesting three lagers are invalid.

Malcolm Caire

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