Milestones in the development of mass communications in Malta

Abstract

Among the new States, Malta has one of the longest, almost uninterrupted traditions of press freedom and, for her size, is lucky to have had a variety of newspaper opinion. It was two well-known British liberals, John Austin and George Cornwall Lewis, who responding to appeals by the Maltese leader Giorgio Mitrovich, strongly recommended the grant of press freedom to the colony. That was in 1838, when the first papers and periodicals began to be published. Before that time we can hardly say that there was a journalistic tradition at all. The Order of st. John had a printing press in the eighteenth century, but this was mainly for official works. Besides, censorship always hung over Malta's head: in the mid-seventeenth century the Grand Master had opted to close a printing press instead of having to put up with interference from the Pope and Inquisitor who insisted on nihil obstat rights in any printed matter associated with religion or the church. During the brief period of French rule over Malta, from 1798 to 1800, a vaguely Bonapartist paper, Le Journal de Malte, was published; but again this was an official gazette rather than a newspaper. It was all 'liberty, equality and fraternity'; and woe to anybody who disagreed. The same style of paper, a government gazette, continued to be published in the first decades of British rule, first in Italian only, and subsequently in Italian and English until in the early twentieth century Maltese too made an appearance in it. Apart from this, in the period before 1838, very few people managed to get anything controversial printed. One was an Italian refugee; the others were Protestant missionaries. Otherwise the only way to get printed matter distributed in Malta was to have it printed in Italy or elsewhere outside the Island, at least until 1839.