It was a known fact that the media run by the two political parties goes overboard to promote the interests of the party that it supports – and this by speaking positively about any initiative taken by the said party and denigrating those made by the opposing side.

The excuse that Net TV, owned by the Nationalist Party, and One TV, run by the Malta Labour Party, balance each other out, with the national broadcasting station playing the role of the middle ground, is convenient enough.

Of course, political parties own media other than TV stations, but the effect that these have on people is much greater than that made by radio stations, newspapers and the internet.

Now that the election is over, both political parties should delve deeper into the situation and think whether the kind of approach they adopted in the five weeks of election campaign, and before that too, was beneficial or detrimental to their own party.

It is safe to say that both Net and One concentrated their efforts towards the diehard supporters – and this in itself is already a mistake. Diehard supporters will vote PN or MLP whatever their party does, and therefore no votes were gained that way.

Yet, the parties should study whether the way their media behaved during the election campaign pushed the so-called floating or undecided voters away from their party, rather than bring them closer.

It may be argued that floating voters do not watch Net or One, but prefer the more balanced PBS. This may be true, but on the other hand it can also be said that most floating voters do watch the political stations as well, and what they saw and heard there might have had the reverse effect that the political parties wanted.

The way journalists, on either side of the political fence, harassed the leaders of the opposite party over and over again probably did not earn any points for the party running the station involved.

Neither did the twisting, turning and spinning of what was said by the opposing party leader, with quotes sometimes taken out of context, help. The continuous repetition of comments and airing of clips was, at times, nauseating too.

This did not happen only during the news bulletins. There were other programmes during which it seemed that Malta was two completely different countries, with everything being painted bright and sunny on the PN side, and the MLP station replying with doom and gloom.

It was not the right way to project things. Even the least intelligent among us knows that there is a lot of grey in between the black and the white, and therefore the tactics of perfection (PN) and total failure (MLP) are simply not believed.

In all of this, the Broadcasting Authority sits pretty, believing that Net and One balance each other out. Yet, it should be the first to sit down, together with the political parties, to see what can be done to improve the situation.

The first thing that needs to be asked is whether political parties should own television stations in the first place. The parties are obviously in favour of having them, and the fact that the PN blamed the defeat in the 1996 election, in part, on the fact that it did not have a TV station at the time will make it even harder for them to accept to stay without one. But if both agree to eliminate them – after all, they are the biggest expense the parties have in their budget – both would be losing.

Since this scenario is hard to imagine, the least that the parties could do is control their media better and make use of it in a proper way. The people are not as gullible and stupid as the political parties’ media think that they are.