The rumblings have been there for quite some time if you cared to listen to them: even as far back as 2013, many were starting to feel a certain unease when it came to TVM. Unsurprisingly, Times Talk was one of the first casualties of war in 2016 and, perhaps more surprisingly, Xarabank was taken off the air in August 2020.

I’ve never been a fan of the latter: many times, I felt like important subjects were drowned out by an excessive amount of shouting and illogical thought but there was no denying its popularity. There is also no denying that its ratings were hardly falling when it was axed last year. It made me deeply uncomfortable that one of the only platforms of debate we had on the islands had been snuffed out overnight.

And, then, other smaller, subtler things began to happen. Important arrests were not filmed. When arrests or court cases took place, the names of our once all-powerful wouldn’t be readily given. It all began to feel vastly surreal.

Here we had a national broadcaster that,  for some reason, no longer seemed to be representing national interests. And, yet, hardly anyone commented on the obvious and wholly known biases of the people involved.

In which world, apart from a bitterly dystopian one, would you appoint a vocal Labour supporter and former One TV journalist, whose husband is the former head of news at the Labour Party TV station, the head of what should be an impartial channel of communication? Nowhere else would this make sense except in North Korea.

And, indeed, like a true dictatorship, this week it has emerged that PBS is asking the producers of current affairs programmes to obtain approval of their topics from the broadcaster’s management 15 days in advance of their shows. I mean, I’m sure that no one here needs a dictionary to look up the meaning of ‘current’ and how that is going to be impacted by a two-week delay but what is even more worrying is that no one seems to be questioning the reasons why someone would request to micromanage current affairs programmes in such a transparent way.

Freedom of speech and freedom to be able to think freely are vital to a healthy country- Anna Marie Galea

If producers are not even allowed free reign with their topics and guests on a national channel, then what does that say about the state of our democracy? Freedom of speech and freedom to be able to think freely are vital to a healthy country. Is the next generation of children to be raised in a country of propaganda and political bias on a national channel? Is no one else worried and scared?

I am taken back to the very public proclamation that Mark Laurence Zammit made in August of this year where he said that he would be leaving the programme that he made popular, L-Erbgħa Fost il-Ġimgħa, because he felt he could not do his job properly. His Facebook status made for a chilling read for anyone who rightfully expects to receive free, unbiased information from their national channels.

For those of us who, for some reason or another, don’t want to smell the coffee I would like to say: stop waiting for explosions to start acting. Free societies are not usually turned upside down by armoured truck; they are slowly and quietly dismantled and eroded, brick by brick until you find yourself standing in the middle of a hollowed-out democracy that no longer carries any meaning. Are we truly able to do and demand no better?