The seminar organised a fortnight ago to mark the 15th anniversary of RTK Radio, the Maltese Church station, was a timely opportunity for many media people on the island to reassess the state of national radio at this moment in time when the process of a multiplication of radio and television channels is going on at an exhilarating pace.
Contrary to what many had predicted way back in the 1980s, the advent of video and the eventual convergence of television with the home PC did not ring the death knell for radio, nor are they likely ever to do so, at least in the foreseeable future. If anything, radio continues to make a fascinating revival everywhere, with even the AM band, once waiting on the electronic Death Row, in recent years gradually undergoing a cleansing technical evolution followed by rejuvenation to compete with the other airwaves, digitised and dignified at the same time.
Unlike PBS radio, the State broadcaster, which continues to exert an existence based on drastic cost-cutting exercises and the elimination of good, earthy local produce to be replaced by a Scottish juke-box that shudders and stutters to create everything but magic, RTK is acutely aware of the incessant need to regenerate itself without shedding all that has made it popular with Maltese listeners over the past 15 years.
Sadly, radio’s survival on the congested electronic highway is not to be mistaken for advancement in quality, at least in Malta’s case. Scientists have long established that the moon throws back the radio waves from earth, and honestly, we certainly cannot blame it. Too much of the same thing is being dished out to nonplussed listeners. No wonder many believe radio is a miraculous device that enables people who have nothing to say to talk to people who aren’t listening.
Programme content on Maltese radio has taken a serious nosedive. If you forget the music, which is also not always the fruit of meaningful selection, most of the talk is either hopelessly uninspiring or simply a conglomeration of sickening reactions from phone-in fanatics with too much time on their hands. There are radio announcers and presenters who talk until you have a headache and then try to sell you something to relieve it.
RTK has taken the bold step of trying to rearrange and readjust its role within all this confusion. Merely celebrating 15 years of transmissions would have been a short-lived, self-congratulatory moment of glory. Instead, it organised this seminar to help make an intellectual analysis of what has been achieved and what lies ahead for a station that needs to reaffirm its message while at the same time dealing with an increasingly (not necessarily worse) secular environment.
It is not an easy mission. Competition from a growing number of community (but not so communal in signal “catchment” potential, as the station’s chairman Victor Formosa hinted to the seminar in his opening address) stations and the rest of the electronic media on this saturated blob of land will only get worse with digitisation. Then there is the metaphorical cross RTK has to carry – basic religious content – and which it has happily carried for a decade and a half. But with Radju Marija and other stations of a parochial nature transmitting such fodder, perhaps it is time for the national Church station to upgrade that content for whoever wants to listen to it. Recent surveys have shown such listeners are not few.
The seminar was addressed by, among others, Antonio Correa d’Oliveira, general manager of Radio Renascenca, who spoke about the Portuguese experience in Church radio broadcasting. In an excellent video presentation, d’Oliveira gave an account of the history and growth of Radio Renascenca – RTK’s counterpart in Portugal. In so doing he quite predictably referred to the station’s bitter incident at the start of the 1975 Flower Revolution in the land of the Fado when it was sadly forced to close down for almost a year by the revolutionaries.
The sworn secular observer, such as yours truly, however, would have expected Mr d’Oliveira to divulge why the revolutionaries, who after all had finally, if ironically, put Portugal back on the world democratic map, had felt compelled to do so. Had Radio Renascenca, as one suspects, previously chosen to remain silent and nonchalant to people’s sufferings during the many years of bitter dictatorship under the fascist Salazar regime?
Lino Spiteri and the Rev. Joe Borg, two other notable speakers during the RTK seminar, both dealt with the issue of the role the Church station still has to play while making sure the challenges of the future are met with the same success of the recent past. They were followed by a much-publicised address by Archbishop Pawl Cremona and an interesting, albeit sometimes confounding, discussion with speakers from the floor.
It is only in this way that Maltese radio can hope to retain its relevance in society. Pluralism has brought quantity but hardly any quality, alas. Our national watchdog, the Broadcasting Authority, is seemingly either too undermanned and too under financed to cope or it has other priorities, but confront the dilemma it one day must.
Like television, teleshopping and mainstream advertising, radio is brutally undermining the national language and no one seems to be batting even an eyelid, the so-called literary societies and the National Council for the Maltese Language included. A government that prides itself on having, one way or another, convinced the Maltese to join the European Union and where, hooray, Maltese took its place as one of the official languages, still cannot cope with the simple task of solving the problem of a dearth of good, qualified translators, let alone the nonexistent exceptions that had earlier won so many votes.
Like RTK, the rest of Maltese radio has to wake up to the job of looking ahead and planning a proper future for the medium that happily continues to defy the cynics.