With this kind of change, Dr Gatt added, it is important for PBS to have on board people who represent the good that existed in the past. This institutional memory in the new PBS will be entrusted to Andrew Psaila as CEO and Fr Borg who for long years has been editorial consultant at PBS.

One can criticise Fr Borg, but everyone accepts he is a good journalist and an expert on television. People also acknowledge he can take good decisions in stressful times.

Nor can one say that there are that many suitable persons in Malta, Dr Gatt added, especially in television broadcasting. One of the worst mistakes is to regard television as an extension of print journalism.

Dr Gatt strongly denied that Fr Borg engineered the changes at PBS to position himself in line for this appointment. It is true Fr Borg made a report for the Task Force for Minister Louis Galea, but the current reorganisation of PBS has diverged from that report in significant matters. Fr Borg had a say in the drawing up of the Broadcasting Plan but the idea to create a totally independent editorial board came from the ministry itself as did the insistence on outsourcing programmes. His appointment came from the ministry, Dr Gatt said, even though he was a “natural choice”.

While still editorial consultant, Fr Borg had tried to introduce more professionalism in the news team at PBS. He had tried very hard to break down the hackneyed way in which PBS tackled news, starting with the first item which always concerns the Prime Minister and going down the scale. But Fr Borg did not have the executive powers to ensure that the changes he suggested were implemented. The responsibility was always that of the manager news and ultimately of the board of directors.

The idea of having an editorial board, Dr Gatt explained, was to create an institutional link between the organisation and the news team. Previously, anyone who had a complaint about any item on the news would be told to speak to the CEO, who had other duties in the organisation. Now such complaints will be handled by the editorial board which has the responsibility for the news carried and which is also able to decide on such issues.

At the same time, this editorial board is such that it is also at some distance from the news team. Otherwise it would have been easy to put in Fr Borg as the news editor with direct and executive responsibility for the news team.

This is still in the experimental stage, Dr Gatt said: one must now see if it will work. The government had the courage to try and do something about the news on PBS.

It is not true that ministers call the PBS newsroom and dictate what news should be published. But the editorial board will now have the freedom to take decisions based on the news value of any item. If the Prime Minister were to make a speech with no news items in it, there is no reason why PBS should carry it.

Not enough has been said on the other aspects of the PBS reorganisation, Dr Gatt feels. For the first time PBS has issued its autumn schedule and is inviting expressions of interest from companies ready to come up with programmes that fit the schedule.

This will be a public process, fully transparent, whereas the previous process consisted mainly of whisperings in ears.

Due to the change at PBS, the call for expressions of interest (which closes at the end of the month) was somewhat late in being issued. It will be on time the next time round: (1 October for programmes starting in April). Following the adjudication on quality by the editorial board, the allocation will be examined by the board of management which will then negotiate the financial terms during July.

Dr Gatt called on people to wait until the process is over before judging this process “cannot work”. Of course, mistakes will be done, and of course people will at the end decide whether this experiment will succeed or not, but one must learn from mistakes.

Besides, for the first time ever, the editorial board is now committed to explain to people why their concept was not accepted. This is a transparent process which had never existed before.