The country is rife with talk of reform of the broadcasting scene. As in many other sectors, reform is long overdue, and it comes easily to many of us to imagine new scenarios where we no longer eat and breathe politics and space is allowed to the very many other areas of our lives which are not in any way party-political. We should leave all hope behind.
The loudly hailed pluralism of the 1990s was not all it was proclaimed to be. It produced political broadcasters and commercial broadcasters occupying the same ether and competing for the same advertisers. Commercial broadcasters are subject to the same formulae and produce largely the same product: news and music in different mixes presented in different styles. They have no remit or interest to give voice to minorities or anything which is not commercially rewarding. They all suffer from the competition made to their enterprises by the political stations, a distorted market probably unique to Malta.
The PBS was subjected to what amounts to a coup some years ago when we all learnt it was a bottomless pit of squandered public funds and had to be reformed in such a way that it would sustain itself. Whether or not savings have been made in this way is not the issue. The question is whether the public broadcaster truly fulfills its role in providing space for civil society and minorities, in being reliably impartial and whether it has the ability to present non-commercial productions which provide relief from the torrential downpour of cheap but financially rewarding populism. In my view, it fails on all counts… but that is just my view.
Nothing amazes me more than the recurring confidence expressed by viewers in their public broadcaster, as consistently shown in the ratings. The fact that the competition is worse does not explain it all away. Is it because so many of us prefer to watch or listen in our native tongue? With such a varied offer available on cable or on satellite, how does PBS retain its dominance?
The principal contribution of the political stations has been to swell the ranks of the infidels. In the bad old days when the media meant only Xandir Malta and the press, we chose our medicine and stuck to it. We know our recent history by the reading and listening choices we made then. It was either one version of propaganda or the other.
The onset of minimal pluralism has allowed us the luxury of zapping from one political station to another in the privacy and comfort of our homes. No newsagent ever becomes privy to the nature of our preferred listening. We make no public statement by going around with this or that newspaper under our arm. Those of us allergic to ‘the other side’ can sneak a peek at what the ‘unspeakable’ are saying. The result has been that we have been allowed to compare and contrast and to find both sides wanting. More significantly, many of us have found our own side wanting, intolerably partisan, offensively manipulative and what’s worse… unintelligent.
My experience of this reality is necessarily coloured by the experience of decades in the struggles of Alternattiva Demokratika to get its foot in the door. We thought it was a bad idea to have political party radio stations and eventually television stations but if we had no control on the situation and every effort was made to render us invisible, we had to resist and join our adversaries.
In the 1992 election campaign when the Church and the Labour Party were granted radio licenses they had not applied for, AD was omitted from the cornucopia of pluralism bestowed on the country. We responded by setting up an unlicensed amateur radio station which served our purposes and, if nothing else, broadcast our intention to persist.
That beginning led to the establishment of a community radio station complete with license and run on slightly more commercial lines. Its range exceeded that of a bona fide community radio station and this continued to irk the authorities until they insisted that we should apply for a national radio license.
It was a huge leap to take on zero resources. The transmitter cost a bomb and most of the other station equipment needed amendment. Above all the license costs, the fees charged for using the master antenna at Gharghur and electricity costs took us into another ball game. We were a political party broadcaster without the advertising clout of the larger parties and obliged to establish a sales and marketing set up to sustain the permanent staff we took on.
Soon enough, the political aspect began to be squeezed out of existence. We knew, but hardly anybody realised that with this arrangement the idea of pluralism inferred by the grant of a license became a sham. We rapidly lost control of our own radio station and after years of agonising about it finally resolved to sell off the license.
Despite the mockery and invective which this has allowed our adversaries over the years, it appears that they too face the similar dilemmas. We made no money from broadcasting and our station survived commercially by disregarding its raison d’etre at the expense of the party. The other parties’ media empires appear to be a colossal financial burden heading for reform in order to avoid disastrous collapse.
One memorable episode on the eve of the 1996 election saw the Greens’ radio people frantically importing their national transmitter only to learn that the Customs at the airport insisted that the 90Kg beast would only be released if we undertook to take it straight to the Wireless and Telegraphy Department for testing on the second floor of the Evans Building in Valletta. There it remained until the election was over. Now wasn’t that a superb trick? Tell me to believe in pluralism in Malta and I’ll give you my wryest smile.
Perhaps the most unforgettable moment came in the run up to the 2003 election. A meeting was held at the Broadcasting Authority attended by all three political party representatives, at which the Chairman and Board had the temerity to raise the issue of balance and impartiality on each of the political stations… or was it whether announcements of political gatherings were to be counted as political broadcasts? The issue itself is not important. It was the combined response of the PN and MLP representatives that did it for me. They told the board in no uncertain terms that its job was to set out the schedule of party political broadcasts on the public broadcaster and to keep its nose out of their businesses. The fact that only Government and Opposition parties are represented on the Board says it all.
At that moment I recalled that it had taken years of litigation in the Constitutional Court for the Greens to gain the right to a minimal share of the annual party political broadcasting on the public broadcaster. Interpreting that forensic victory as restrictively as possible, the Greens were granted a proportion of that airtime in relation to the proportion of votes gained in the previous election: around 10 minutes a year. Until it suited the PN in the EU referendum Campaign, Greens never appeared in discussion programmes with the other parties.
Clearly, the emergence of any third party constitutes a major threat to the status quo on an electoral level, but it would also lead to a forced retreat of all political parties from much of the media ground they occupy today, in acknowledgement of the fact that they are private entities ending the current misappropriation of the commons.
So far, the lack of trust between them has prevented any such development. Politics remains a no-holds-barred sport. The memories of past outrages linger on in both camps. They have absolutely no reason to trust one another. They know that every opportunity to cheat will be snapped up just as it arises. The capture of the handful of votes that makes all the difference in their winner-takes-all world cannot be left to chance.
If between elections we are entertained with buddy-buddy scenes between politicians, joyrides to show off their very human sides, the final moments of electoral campaigns, when anything goes, remain the stumbling block for a true reform or anything like a liberalisation of broadcasting.
Regurgitating all this is not an exercise in nostalgia. It provides a few snapshots which tell us where we are today: a long way from Xandir Malta and the ban on cordless telephones… but probably just as far from a serene and civilised broadcasting set up. If the reform is to be managed by two political parties it will be no reform at all. It will not be a reform if it is conditioned by all political parties without taking into account the vast and varied civil society reality which continues to exist in the shadows. There is more to life, more to Malta than pop music and politics.
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