The people who run Public Broadcasting Services usually come from the political sector and have little or no experience in broadcasting or even journalism.

Hence, time and again, under different administrations, the remits get hazy and seek to please the ultimate decision maker, or to cut it short, the man at the top from whom come salaries and perks.

There is precious little of target setting and deliverables. The people get to have what the decision-maker decides they need to have.

But in the context of broadcasting in Malta, for all that the main political parties each has its own television station, PBS remains the main means of conveying news to the vast bulk of the Maltese population. There is simply no shaking of the PBS supremacy in this regard.

But given that PBS is very much in the hands of the powers that be, it rarely ventures to adventurous areas of news and usually, again under both administrations, focuses on ministerial activities and those items of news it considers safe enough to carry.

This is why, especially in lean times such as the summer shutdown period, known as the ‘silly season’, and also around Christmas, it tends to fill the news period with tame, lightweight, soporific news items.

This Christmas we have had more than our share of it. Such as stories about people who have as their hobby building miniature churches, or stories that focus on the personal, the trivial and the banal.

It is not as if there are no other stories to be broadcast about what is happening around in this country of ours. PBS felt aggrieved so much at criticism it failed to see the news value of Minister Edward Scicluna’s extraordinary, (if not inept) appearance in front of a European Parliament committee that it went to the extreme of getting a lawyer to reply to the paper that commented.

The fact that the Broadcasting Authority felt that the party in opposition had not suffered any loss through imbalance is neither here nor there. If anything, it is the viewers in general who have suffered an imbalance.

Over the past months, PBS has seen its newsroom expand and expand again with recruits coming from either side of the political spectrum. Many of these recruits have enough journalistic experience to know what constitutes a good story and what viewers are interested to see. Yet, time and again, under different administrations, PBS news inevitably becomes bland and trims its sails to the party in power.

The fact we have just had a big change in government shows that people, ie the viewers, see through all this camouflage and sense reality despite all the attempts at holding up a skewed mirror for them to see.

People are no fools. They are not fooled by spurious, soporific stories when so many real stories lie around. The growth today of social media, where each person is, we may say, his own editor, has drastically cut down the power of the big television stations to set the mindset of the country as a whole.