In a couple of months, the three-year term of the Broadcasting Authority will expire and a new one will be appointed. For the Prime Minister it will be a test of his views on the regulation of broadcasting in this country. Does he want to retain the archaic status quo? Or does he truly believe that we have become a European democracy in every sense of the word. In essence, his decision will be a litmus test of his understanding of the role of the media, certainly not an insignificant one, in European Malta in the next three years.

What is wrong with the Broadcasting Authority today? In a word, practically everything. The reason is simple: the way it is constituted prevents it from functioning properly. For a number of decades, it has been the “practice” that two of its members are effectively appointed by the party in government, two by the party in opposition and the chairman by the Prime Minister after “consultation” with the Leader of the Opposition.

Although there is nothing illegal or unconstitutional in this practice, it is a perversion of what a Broadcasting Authority should be in a contemporary European democracy. That it is effectively packed with political party nominees means that it represents the parties’ interests not society’s. This simple point has deep historical and socio-political roots.

Constitutionally, the Broadcasting Authority is still more or less the product of a 1960’s colonial mindset whereby broadcasting was the monopoly of the State. The Broadcasting Authority was created to control the political battleground within that monopoly, what is today called PBS. The practice of giving political parties effective control over the Broadcasting Authority, a practice which is not in the law but started by Gorg Borg Olivier, was a political compromise between the parties in Parliament. It was intended to ensure that the only broadcasting channel in the land would be “balanced”. For this read: it was supposed to look after their partisan interests equally.

Like everything else, it was Dom Mintoff who broke this balance. In the seventies, when he decided to turn the PBS into an arm of the MLP’s propaganda machine, when one of his ministers wanted to use it to create a “socialist generation”, he knew he would run into problems with the PN’s representatives in the Broadcasting Authority. So he did what only a mind like Mintoff’s could contemplate. He simply did not nominate its members and thereby closed it down in the only legal way possible. And with this decision, PBS became what Super One is today with one slight difference - it was paid for by taxpayers. When the Authority was reconstituted in the eighties, the political parties moved in full force. And remains to this day.

Since then, something else happened which makes the political control of the Broadcasting Authority even less tenable than in the days of Gorg Borg Olivier. When television airwaves were liberalised in the democratic world, the private sector invariably moved in and flourished. In Malta, liberalisation of the airwaves did the opposite. It created a unique, homegrown ugly phenomenon – the birth of television stations owned by political parties. Labour set theirs up first. Although the PN resisted the idea at first they succumbed to the temptation after the electoral loss of 1996. The state monopoly transmogrified into monopoly of the political party Stations.

Since then, political stations have become so much a part of our national furniture that few still pause to contemplate how weird, un-European and democratically questionable their existence is. Even fewer worry about the consequence of the sad phenomenon. More than a decade after what should have been the birth of privately-owned television stations, we are still without even one. With all due respect, Smash is not really a station.

The creation of political stations plonked a brand new problem on the Broadcasting Authority’s lap. How was it supposed to carry out its constitutional mandate, to ensure that every political television station was balanced, fair and impartial? How could a politically-owned station, which owes its existence to a party which wants to retain or win power, be prevented from being biased?

The Authority responded to this quandary with a decision, in

force till today: the PN and the MLP’s stations balance each

other out and therefore do not need to abide by the same rules that

other stations, public and private have to. It was a decision which shaped the ugly face of political broadcasting we watch on the box every night.

Now take a step back and look at the overall picture. The PN and MLP own their own television stations. At the same time they effectively nominate their own representatives on the Broadcasting Authority that is supposed to regulate them. If this is not a perversion of the spirit of contemporary democratic practice I do not know what is. Given that PBS, as the only other competing station, is not represented, I will leave it to you to imagine the ways in which there could be an abuse for political and commercial interests.

Now that we are in Europe, this situation has become more untenable than ever before. And it should be the Nationalist Party in government, a party which took Malta there, that has the obligation to change it.

The Broadcasting Authority is meant to encourage healthy, open and fair journalism, enforce broadcasting standards across the board and assist the stations in becoming part of a conversation that the country has with itself and the world around it. Today it is doing nothing of the sort. This is certainly not an indictment of all the members of

the Authority, past or present. Some of them have tried to do their best to do their job in difficult circumstances. Others, however, have

had few qualms about using their seat to look after the interests of their party.

For these reasons, I appeal to Lawrence Gonzi to break with tradition and create a new Broadcasting Authority which this country deserves in this day and age. My hope is that Alfred Sant would follow suit. In choosing the five men and women to sit on the new board, only one principle should be kept in mind. The Authority is there to safeguard the interests of society not poltical parties. In this sense, the people running it should be chosen because of their integrity, experience and ability to represent or at least understand as wide a spectrum of social, cultural, and political views as possible.

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