Former PBS news head Reno Bugeja said that his newsroom was not censored during his tenure but would not comment about the present situation.   

On Friday, civil society group Repubblika said there was a state of censorship in the Public Broadcasting Services (PBS) and served as a tool for the government to stifle critical voices.  

Repubblika president Robert Aquilina pointed out that the last station schedule was short of investigative journalism and current affairs discussion programmes.  

On Saturday, Bugeja said that members from Repubblika and other activists who are critical of the government, such as Manuel Delia were invited on TVM during his seven-year tenure as head of news and the station's editor. 

"It's been more than two years since I left; in my time, there was none (censorship); I cannot comment on what is happening today," he said.   

Bugeja, who retired in 2020, was interviewed on the Andrew Azzopardi show on RTK 103 FM, Saturday morning.  

He discussed the state of Malta's broadcasting landscape and PBS in particular.

Asked about his successor as TVM editor and head of news Norma Saliba, Bugeja said that he was not involved in that appointment or in hiring her as a journalist with TVM before that. 

Saliba was gradually edged out of the TVM newsroom, having first been stripped of the editor role before tendering her resignation as head of news a few months ago. 

She is rumoured to have had a falling out with Public Broadcasting Services executive chairman Mark Sammut. 

BA regulations are 'restricting'

Bugeja said PBS news staff are often "restricted" in their work due to Broadcasting Authority regulations they must abide by. 

Those rules, which for instance require impartiality, supposedly apply to all broadcasters. 

But the "eyes of the Broadcasting Authority" have always been on PBS, Bugeja said, as he dismissed political party broadcasters as fuelling a "propagandist message, and the news is more commentary than news".  

Two television and radio stations, ONE and NET, are directly owned by the Labour and Nationalist parties.  

Asked about their relevance, Bugeja said he was always sceptical about party stations. "But it is difficult for me to say whether they should remain or not".  

"What's clear is that they (the stations) impoverished the parties," he said.  

He said that parties are not spending their resources on policy research but on maintaining their television and radio stations.