Grate viewing

Not everyone realises that belonging to the media is, if not exactly a mission, then a solemn responsibility towards one's readers or viewers. Whereas a bad piece, or a bad programme, fritters away only a few moments of eternity for the people involved in it, the number of (hu)man hours squandered is multiplied in direct proportion to those who, for want of anything better to do, read it or watch it. The total amount of time thrown away by the bored may, therefore, add up to years.

The Babylonian King Hammurabi, to whom nearly all parents are grateful (he came up with the idea of formal schooling), put it more succinctly. This man was not one for commissioning lengthy time and motion or other types of reports full of hot air and thin ice (i.e. hot water); he didn't illustrate how he wanted things done, he just said what he wanted to see accomplished. In his legal code, a copy of which was discovered in 1920, he stated explicitly that if a building collapsed and killed someone, its builder deserved to die.

Therefore, seeing that no one at Super One has yet thought of inserting the word "bad" in front of a bulletin that has Malta going to the dogs, just as no one at Net has inserted "good" in a what is often just a string of press releases depicting Malta in the seventh heaven, I choose to take the above, suitably watered down, as an allegory.

What does one make of a so-called newspaper review, when all the correspondent does is rattle off the titles of the pieces, without commenting, and occasionally throws in a bit of information about a picture appearing in the papers?

Moreover, sometimes not even the minutest details are right; someone has six children, they put her down for five; another woman has two children, and they say she has four. And if not even something that may so easily be ascertained, is not thoroughly investigated, are we to believe so-called "reliable sources" when they come up with personal, lurid and spicy details?

Almost every week I have to point out the glaring lack of respect for people (that are not their kith and kin) by our journalists; but this is just a reminder: there is a world of difference in using just one phrase to describe a terrible accident, and a whole graphic paragraph, which is even, in some cases, accompanied by footage that goes way beyond the realms of bad taste, and would have ended up on the cutting room floor of even Shelly Rayner.

And while we're on the subject, whatever happened to the proper-Maltese-or-bust policy envisaged quite a few moons ago? Net Television people still have their own numerical system (mija u zewgt elef) and Super One people go one better by inventing their own worst-case scenarios (splodew il-Pentagon) and syntax (Il-Nazzjon, il-Torca, etc).

And I take it that no one has yet hit on the dog-eared but reliable formula of providing phonetic spellings or at least Maltese pronunciations of proper nouns to people who are supposed to be familiar with them by virtue of research... but they are not because the fact that bulletins (and commentaries) hardly change form one day to the next, with stale news being given as "updates", indicates that what the compilers have in mind is politicising everything, with the presenters running a serious risk of getting repetitive strain injury in their tongues, so often do they have to mouth the same banalities.

Even foreign news is presented in such a way as to present the Government, or the Opposition, or Alternattiva, as the case may be, in a bad light (as in "Look at what their colleagues in Tuskegee did... really these Socialists/Democrats/Greens are all cut from the same cloth...").

Incidentally, I would love to know why news bulletins are not neatly divided into 'local' and 'foreign' sections, but presented in a hotchpotch that necessitates the overuse of clichés such as "back to our shores", or "once more a foreign news item", several times. This type of slaloming doesn't add interest; it merely irritates.

There was a time when we were offered jobs on PBS because rats had already started leaving the sinking ship with an eye on the then forthcoming liberalisation of the media, especially when they were offered jobs with titles attached to them, rather than one where their name was among others on a typewritten list on the door.

Reorganisation, streamlining, call it what you will, has meant that there are already rumours of how The Station of the Nation's newsroom cannot cope with all that is involved in chasing a story and writing it up, because this is the real world., not Murphy Brown or, perhaps, Not the Nine O'Clock News. So, what's new?

Cherchez la femme, apart from being a sexist comment, is also the name of a game with which teachers of the French language try to whet the jaded outlooks of their pupils on a Friday afternoon.

So, Mena Suvari would be the answer to a question about which is possibly the only filmstar ever to have starred in four films with "American" in the title American Pie, American Beauty, American Pie 2 and American Virgin.

However, it was "Cio-Cio San" ("What was the name of Madame Butterfly?") that won a cool $1 million for an American contestant, recently - again, this new item did not reach our shores because the budgets of caches awarded for general knowledge questions do not amount to that much, perhaps because the questions are far easier.

The terms quiz-films-prizes of course bring to mind Net Television's Fortissimo, a programme which was advertised as being 'about music', but ended up including other [sort-of] related topics as well.

I would have understood the logic behind a contestant being asked "Name at least one Sixties song that was heard in Grease", but I cannot fathom how questions included "Who starred in ...?" when someone might have applied to be on the show on the strength of usually recognising all the records on Sarabanda.

In Malta (and in Italy) some singers tend to be programme presenters tend to be models tend to be actors, yet this trend is not as commonplace - yet - in Hollywood, unless we're talking about Cher, Barbra Streisand, and, pathetically, Jerry Hall, Jennifer Lopez and Madonna.

Be that as it may, I am reliably informed that some contestants - and not only those who did not win - were ready to seek arbitration following some decisions they deemed unjust, but they were dissuaded by others who explained in words of one syllable that, literally, the game was not worth the candle.

Incidentally, this is the first time I heard of a prize being described to the successful contestants as "the one I agreed about with the establishment offering it", without the winners actually knowing its brand or the value of the item they would have won.