Enemies of the free press are found everywhere. Recently, a British Conservative MP said that the BBC’s coverage of Boris Johnson’s parties in Downing Street during the pandemic amounted to a “coup attempt” against the prime minister.
Then, last week, Karl Stagno Navarra, heftily paid by bankrupt Air Malta but daily presenting on Labour’s television station, said that two journalists who had the temerity of asking questions to the prime minister were in cahoots with “agents of chaos”.
The BBC’s coverage of Johnson’s parties is consistently devastating as it is professional. BBC journalists are bred in a culture of journalistic autonomy which is buttressed by structures that guarantee autonomy. They guard their journalistic profession and show no deference to the prime minister or politicians.
They do, however, pay a price for their good journalism. Johnson’s government is freezing BBC funding for two years, effectively reducing it by tens of millions because of inflation. Labour spokesperson Lucy Powell quite rightly described the decisions as a vendetta against the BBC’s coverage.
In contrast, in Malta, the government has substantially increased its annual contribution to PBS. This is not because the government is keen on PBS giving the Maltese public the BBC-type of journalism. On the contrary, PBS has upgraded its entertainment programmes on the main channel and relegated discussion programmes to a channel that nobody watches.
The 8pm news bulletin kept its prime slot as the government knows that Robert Abela, unlike Johnson, has no worries about the output of the public broadcaster’s news bulletin.
Norman Vella’s (2021) research for his MA thesis (described by Leicester University as the best MA thesis of that year) shows that the majority of responding journalists strongly believe that PBS is biased in favour of the government and that it is not representing and treating fairly all different views and values present in society. It is also very telling that even PBS journalists tend to agree with the first statement.
This is an endemic thorn in the side of our media system. I had, in other fora, proposed for discussion a radical structural solution. In line with the Swedish model of public service broadcasting, PBS should not be owned by the government but by a foundation financed by a tax. This would give the structural autonomy which could then bloom a culture of journalistic autonomy.
PBS should not be owned by the government but by a foundation financed by a tax- Fr Joe Borg
A second thorn infesting our media system is the composition of the Broadcasting Authority. The BA should reflect the country as a whole and not just the political parties. This renders it toothless, faced by continuous manipulation outrages.
Vella’s (2021) study also shows that the majority of journalists are in favour of media ownership by political parties. This varies from 61 per cent approval of political TV stations to an 82 per cent approval of the parties’ news websites. I am certain that this support for ownership does not imply approval of the manipulation carried by these stations. However, it would be naïve to expect the removal of this third thorn unless the first two are remedied.
Journalists are fully conscious that, besides threats from abroad, such as SLAPP, our media also face internal threats. Just over 80 per cent of journalists believe the government (described as Malta’s biggest advertiser) gives or withholds advertising to influence the content. The government’s use of the state’s powers and resources to favour its own partisan agenda is undemocratic. In these times when cash is in short supply, this attitude of the government is a major threat.
Other critical issues mentioned by journalists in Vella’s (2021) study are smear campaigns aimed at discrediting their work, internet trolls organised or prompted by their political masters and a police force that is too often reluctant to investigate further their stories.
The above shows that what ails our media system is much wider than what is covered by the terms of reference the prime minister gave to his committee of ‘experts’.
Those terms of reference do not even task the committee to provide how journalism is given the constitutional guarantees as the fourth pillar of democracy.
Besides, it is unacceptable that the committee is keeping under wraps the draft legislation forwarded by the prime minister for their comments. Instead of a public inquiry, are we having a private pow-wow about media reform?
However, no one should expect the prime minister to pine for a radical rehaul of our media system.
He’s obviously happier having independent journalists castigated for being “agents of chaos” than having journalists who could execute a BBC-style “coup” against him.