So the prime minister, last Sunday, announced a proposal to reform and upgrade the media being announced over the coming days.
Considering how his administration has emerged battered from the grey-listing, then the verdict by the three judges, to say nothing about the Zammit-Lewis Gahan Laburista jape, he needed to come up with something to distract attention. Which is why, even before the proposal was fleshed out, it was already suspect in many people’s minds.
Pressed with his back to the wall and all the time avoiding to say the words and take the action that really matter, Robert Abela now wants to help reform the media.
He sort of linked the initiative to the conclusions of the three judges even when this was by far not the main point made. To be sure, there have been some sporadic calls for the reform of the media, mostly by people or institutions outside the media like the President. Nothing concrete has ever emerged.
Anything that a person in authority says about the media is instantly suspect especially when that person prospects some indefinable reform.
We only have to look at that section of the media directly under the responsibility of the prime minister, that is, PBS, to get an idea of the reform he may be thinking about – a weak media, succumbing to all sorts of ministerial pressures, devotedly searching high and low for ‘positive’ stories and determinedly disregarding far more important stories which matter more to the audience.
Is PBS the template for the reform of the media?
There is, however, a reality that makes a shambles of any such plan of reform. The media has changed, is still changing and is moving on in directions which cannot be harnessed or reigned back.
When I first joined the media, in the 1970s, the media in Malta amounted to just four daily papers, two in the Maltese and two in the English language. They were limited to just one edition a day.
Today we have media houses, rather than papers, and they have multiple editions each day which are far more attractive through the use of visuals, films, colour etc than a stolid paper with columns of text.
More, in case somebody comes up once again with some idea of registration, permits, licences etc, you don’t need any permit to put up a post on Facebook or any kind of social media. Everyone has become a potential editor.
The result is a cacophony of voices where every opinion is aired and everybody can emit judgement or contradict others. People no longer hide their identities, as they used to do in other times. Much of the content verges on the libellous. Controversies are quite easy to flare up and inflame.
And yet the level of polarization now is far less acute than what we had in those days. To read the comments on today’s social media may lead one to think we are at each other’s throats but the reality is not like that at all.
Apart from polarization, anyone who bothers to follow the social media has a better chance of understanding what’s going on than if one were to rely on the government’s spin machine.
There was once controversy over the Broadcasting Act definition of balance until it came to mean a general balance rather than the balance of one paper in particular. I am not so sure I agree with this. Clearly the law needs to be fleshed out further and successive cases may be one way of doing so.
Over the past years and especially in the dark days of the pandemic, there were many appeals for the government to help the beleaguered media. This touches a very sensitive area. Ideally the media must survive on its own through sales, advertising and so on. This is how the media survives elsewhere. Malta’s small size is no excuse for the government to muscle in.
If the economies of scale do not make it possible for the media to survive on its own steam, the flow and spread of news through the social media will still be stronger than any attempt to curtail it.
Other countries have not been so lucky. Think Hong Kong, think North Korea, think Belarus, and nearer home think Hungary. Like Nazi Germany, many restrictions began with plans to reform.
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