|
Karl Schembri
It’s official: PBS will never be the same again. Whether it will be better or worse remains to be seen, although with all the shedding of workers and the closing down of FM Bronja and Channel 12 it seems clear that despite the rhetoric about public service obligations, the government’s concern remains the bottomline.
The warning signs came immediately with the appointment of the Cabinet after last year’s election, with Austin Gatt becoming responsible for PBS, not as culture or education minister, but as investments minister. That decision put the country’s public service broadcaster on the same footing as the Drydocks and Air Malta.
Gatt sent shockwaves when he said he would reduce the PBS staff to around 50 from over 180. He had also said PBS could become like the other commercial stations, doing away with any hint of public service obligations.
Since then, the only stakeholder consulted was the General Workers’ Union, hardly a public broadcasting advocate. No mention was made of tax payers’ rights in the discussions, and PBS’s essential democratic role. It was just a labour issue that had to be solved with Malta’s largest union. PBS Chairman Michael Mallia remained conveniently silent throughout the whole restructuring process, possibly because he has nothing to say about public broadcasting.
Now there will be just over 60 workers left, with the GWU’s approval, and television productions will no longer fall under their job description. The majority of productions broadcast by PBS will actually be farmed out, with news being the only exclusive production for the state broadcaster. Also, the broadcaster will only be receiving Lm500,000 a year from the government for its public service obligations.
What was most striking about the PBS restructuring was the way Gatt decided to cut staff before even having drawn up the broadcasting policy, which was only announced last week, with Culture Minister Francis Zammit Dimech appearing at the last minute to present the policy.
Of course, PBS was indefensible when it came to work practices. Instead of strengthening it to provide better, more creative and inclusive public service broadcasting, the government just treated the company as if it were any other state company. The “mission statement” only came last week.
Now, with a handful of journalists, the government promises to provide “journalism of excellence”. Current affairs programmes will be farmed out.
None of the PBS workers but one contacted by MaltaToday would speak on the record before all the reforms are carried out.
“Everyone’s demotivated over here,” said one of the managers. “We’re going to end up operating a relay station, broadcasting readymade commercial productions, producing nothing.”
Veteran broadcaster George Peresso said he was “saddened and angered” by the government’s decision to close FM Bronja.
“They just abandoned FM Bronja over the years so that they could have a pretext to close it down,” Peresso said. “Bronja was a refuge for all those who were sick of the stupid DJs, of the prepotence of the know-alls, and of all the trash that’s being broadcast on the airwaves. Now they’re using the BA statistics, which are flawed anyway, to say the station had no audience. It just goes to show what a poor vision the government has of public broadcasting. This is the first time in 30 years at PBS that I’ve lost all my enthusiasm.”
He added that the new tendering process for contracting out television and radio programmes will only serve to “favour the chosen ones who knew beforehand what was happening”.
Media consultant Fr Joe Borg, who drafted substantial parts of the new broadcasting policy, dismisses such scepticism.
“This is the wrong attitude,” he says. “I staked my reputation on this reform and I’m very enthusiastic about it. There have been some very positive developments, such as the public service obligation contract, new codes of practices and the setting up of an editorial board, which will be responsible for the station’s editorial decisions, while the board of directors will have a say in finances on the basis of the editorial requirements. We will have to review the situation regularly to see how things can improve along the way.”
Fr Borg said the new structures will promote creativity and outsourcing should not be viewed as a licence for mediocrity as outsourced programmes would have to satisfy a rigorous set of criteria to go on air.
“Creativity has a short shelf-life,” he said. “Now the new structures will make it possible to buy creativity according to the station’s needs. Of course it will all depend on the people managing PBS and on how ready they are to face the new challenges ahead. I’m seeing this as a great challenge. The new structure gives us the potential to make PBS a great public broadcaster.”
Meanwhile, tomorrow PBS will be holding a meeting for independent producers wishing to submit their proposals for programmes and advertising agencies to explain its programme statement of intent.
The Malta Labour Party criticised the call for programmes, saying that the fresh start that PBS was supposed to have meant the dismantling of public broadcasting and more sale of airtime to private companies.
Peresso described tomorrow’s meeting as “a meeting for those companies that have cropped up like mushrooms to take over public broadcasting … the new capitalists”, while the state was abdicating its public broadcasting obligations.
“Let me be clear: the EU and the Council of Europe themselves are in favour of farming out part of public broadcasting productions, but the idea behind farming out is to have broadcasting diversity, not to dismantle public broadcasting. The way the restructuring was carried out is going to leave nothing public about Public Broadcasting Services. It’s the end of PBS.”
It is definitely the end of PBS as we know it.
karl@newsworksltd.com
|
