Malta’s public broadcasting must be completely overhauled to ensure it is insulated from political influence, with the broadcasting regulator also freed of government control, the ADPD has argued.
“Public broadcasting’s editorial policies are specifically tailored to support the government of the day,” said Carmel Cacopardo, who chairs ADPD – the Green Party. “The lack of impartiality of public broadcasting is compounded by the political stations which are just propaganda tools for which there should be no room in a modern EU democracy.”
The Green Party said that it wanted “root and branch” reform of public broadcasting, which it said should not fall directly within a minister’s remit but rather be administered independently.
The same went for the Broadcasting Authority, it said, which should not be stuffed with government appointees.
Solutions could be found in the various models adopted in other countries, Cacopardo said, with many relying on parliament to ensure public broadcasting served the national interest.
But for that to work, Malta would need to have more than two parties in parliament, he noted.
ADPD deputy secretary Sandra Gauci argued that years of “never-ending tribal propaganda” on the national broadcaster as well as the PL and PN stations had critically impoverished Maltese society, with few lessons seemingly learnt, four years after Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder.
“Instead of learning from this tragedy and becoming a more democratic society, we have become a country which is more tribal, seeing others who criticise the way things are done here as ‘jealous’, instead of striving to improve society and our media landscape,” she said.
The ADPD said that the country also needed to find ways of funding investigative journalism, describing it as “a Foundation of the democratic state”.
“For investigative journalism nothing is out-of-bounds. It is indispensable to ensure that political accountability is for real,” Cacopardo said as he and his colleague Gauci paid tribute to Caruana Galizia.
Her investigations, they said, remained relevant today and people now knew more about them as a result of further investigations carried out thanks to her work.
Concerns about a lack of impartiality in public broadcasting have been emphasised in recent weeks by the Nationalist Party, with its leader Bernard Grech attributing the party’s poor polling numbers in part to a lack of fair coverage on public media.
“Public broadcasting has been captured by the Labour Party and Castille. It doesn’t allow our message to reach the people as it should,” Grech said in a Times of Malta interview.
The PN leader however said he was against removing party representatives from the Broadcasting Authority board.