Pitfalls of pluralism

During recent months, certain elements with self-serving interests ganged together and encouraged the view that the Malta Broadcasting Authority is a dinosaur, haunting the democratic environment.

These same elements have argued time and again that the Broadcasting Authority is well past its sell-by date and that its forays in the public domain are, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, a potential threat to freedom of the airwaves.

It is possibly because of this that a good segment of the local media hardly bats an eyelid when the annual reports of the Authority, the latest one included, are published.

This view has been challenged by the chairman of the Broadcasting Authority, Chief Justice Emeritus, Joseph Said Pullicino, in a message appended with the latest report.

This message is remarkable for its analysis as well as for its prose - it is a clear-cut departure from the past. The chairman declared that the Broadcasting Authority, "as currently constituted, embarks upon its first full calendar year of activity after an engaging nine months in office" and sees "the need of carefully implementing its full role in society as prescribed by the Constitution".

This is a mouthful whose significance could only be assessed in the follow-up. Time will tell. Final judgment has to wait pending further developments or lack of them.

For the time being, Dr Said Pullicino has projected his thoughts and identified his wavelength. He went so far as issuing a notice to mariners when he suggested, on his own authority, that "the national broadcaster's programming should be eased, some of their products repositioned".

After many years of supine inaction, it begins to look as if something is astir within the Broadcasting Authority. Before the chairman let go his latest message, this did not seem to catch the eye of the print media.

The chairman's major concern is the public broadcasting sector, and his responsibility to "promote democracy" via an authority structured along the lines adopted "by some 50 other civilised countries".

Dr Said Pullicino maintains that "contemporary democracy and broadcasting are veritably a product of each other. There can be no real democracy without just broadcasting. There can be no fair broadcasting without just democracy. This is not to exclude the press, parliament and the other pillars of a democracy from the equation. Yet there is no doubt that the sheer reach and force of radio and television place them at the fulcrum of the social contract that civil societies like ours have entered into."

As such, they are to be protected as well as controlled, he insisted. "Protected, such that the meek and the voiceless may borrow our ears too. Controlled, such that those who sell the one-sided coin may be called to reveal the other face. When protection and control lapse, the truth is unlikely to linger on. Our country knows this, has seen it close at hand and has acted to remedy it. It must now ensure that the remedy is effective and long-lasting".

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Pluralism has been seen as the remedy. It is a remedy that has to be refined. The chairman is conscious that, although giant strides have been made so far, the Authority has its preoccupations. On the positive side, "information can now hardly be stamped under the finger of any one person". A new breed and generation of broadcasters has emerged, all with their particular perspectives, some giving birth to investigative, stimulating and culture-based programming. These operate within the newly set-up structures or within independent, small production cells which gradually became professional production organisations.

The national broadcaster opted to rely increasingly upon external input in its domestic programming.

Dr Said Pullicino did not mince his words: he observed that this reliance has its perils and pointed out that he has noted this openly earlier on.

This evolving situation did not create the conditions to encourage "investments into the training of an in-house investigative unit which presents its efforts in prime time, simply because there is no such team to train".

While the Broadcasting Authority has been willing to encourage and recognise the producers of the so-called farmed-out programmes, acknowledging that their freshness and independence is vital, it considers that their spread and prominence on the national broadcasting programming (via PBS) should be eased and some of them repositioned.

The chairman called for space to be created "for the work of a team with impeccable journalistic and editorial qualities operating from within (within PBS) and protected by security of tenure". And he specified that "this cell must provide what every man and woman of this country deserve in broadcasting, truth, representation and continuity".

There is an element of embroidery in recognising that there is a void.

The bare bones of the matter is that public broadcasting needs to depend on its own professional expertise in undertaking one of its basic responsibilities: namely investigative probes and reporting, free from political, commercial and other interests, hidden or otherwise. If this is a responsibility of the public broadcaster, such responsibility could be acquitted if it decides what to investigate and how, rather than to delegate the task to outsiders whose professionalism is coloured by their perspectives.

However professional, all journalism is deep down, subjective. But, while autonomous investigative journalists may have political views to which they are entitled, and which deserve respect, public broadcasters should be, and seen to be, independent of party politics. This is a constitutional requirement and it is the Broadcasting Authority that has the onus to remedy matters.

The need for that remedy has now been perceived. It is now about time to deliver.