After yesterday’s mad behaviour by the Labour Party and the crosspatch it dispatched to Xarabank, the Broadcasting Authority has held an urgent meeting and pronounced itself.
The Labour Party, it has said, should not have given up its slot to Franco Debono and had no right to do so.
Unfortunately, the Broadcasting Authority is here hoist by its own petard. Some weeks ago, it made the controversial declaration that political parties can send whomsoever they please to represent them on shows and in debates on the state TV station.
It is not up to the show hosts, interviewers or production companies to select and personally invite politicians as long as each of the two parties in Parliament is represented, the Broadcasting Authority said. The parties must be represented and given equal airtime, yes – that still obviously holds. But the parties themselves should be able to do the choosing.
This was a stupid decision, a dangerous and anti-democratic one, because it allows the political parties to hide or hold back the individuals it considers detrimental to its electoral chances, by ensuring that they are not exposed to questioning on mainstream, independent television. This decision by the Broadcasting Authority has allowed the Labour Party, for example, to keep Anglu Farrugia away from shows where he might fail as catastrophically as he did on his notorious ‘on de record’ outing on Bondi+. The political parties can now hide their embarrassing people, the inarticulate ones and those who are intellectually challenged.
The testing-point came, as we all know by now, with debates and interviews that are role-specific: the two deputy leaders. This clearly left the Labour Party unable to hide Anglu Farrugia and its other deputy leader, that moustachioed clown Toni Abela, while sending along somebody it considers more palatable, like Owen Bonnici or Gavin Gulia. So first Farrugia didn’t turn up, claiming he was indisposed, to a double deputy leader interview on Dissett (and that’s with a Labour-friendly interviewer). Then Farrugia said he couldn’t turn up to Xarabank because he was “unable to do so for personal reasons”, and asked for the show to be postponed. Then, when it was postponed to the day before yesterday, he pulled out again and Labour’s communications guru Kurt Farrugia turned up instead with the man now known as Frankie Tabone.
I don’t think you need the details from me as to what happened next.
Anyway, this really put the cat among the Broadcasting Authority’s panicked pigeons. An urgent meeting was convened and a statement issued: when it said that the political parties had a right to choose who to dispatch to shows on state television, it had not foreseen the eventuality that a political party might actually hit on the bright idea of choosing a representative who is not actually a representative, in that he or she is not actually a politician of that party.
The Labour Party, the Broadcasting Authority said, should have respected the agreement to send its deputy leader, and should not have sent somebody who is not even part of the Labour Party let alone its deputy leader.
Given that the agreed-upon individual (Anglu Farrugia) did not turn up for the show, then the state television station had every right to allow the show to go on without him, the Authority said, and the other participant, PN deputy leader Simon Busuttil, could have had the whole show to himself perfectly legitimately.
That didn’t happen, though, because Busuttil rightly held out for a debate with Anglu Farrugia and stuck to his guns about it. Had he gone on alone, he would have benefited from a major prime-time advantage, but he would also have allowed Labour to hide its sorry excuse for a deputy leader.
The Broadcasting Authority also tackled Labour’s hysterical objections to the announcements, which TVM broadcast repeatedly on Friday to explain why that night’s edition of Xarabank was not going out. The national television station, the Authority said, has not just the right but also the actual duty to inform its viewers why scheduled programmes are not being transmitted. It did say, however, that the station was “wrong” to have broadcast a lengthy explanation in which “only one side was heard”.
Oddly, the Broadcasting Authority – which almost never bothers tackling the situation with the party stations, because it considers the one to ‘balance out’ the other – this time got very cross with them. All television stations that discussed the issue failed to serve their viewers well, it said.
Well, I don’t know about that. People who aren’t of below average intelligence are perfectly capable of working out what happened and what the implications were and still are. As for those of below average intelligence, most of them were watching Super One anyway, so expect no miracles there.
The Broadcasting Authority has said it will not stand for this sort of thing happening again. In that, it is not alone. Electors will not stand for it, either.
Friday’s Cunning Plan turned out to be a massive public relations disaster for the Labour Party, but anybody with half a fried brain could have foreseen what would happen. That Labour did not, and actually thought it was a brilliant idea, is further evidence, if more were needed, that the whole lot of them are unfit for purpose.
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