Déjà vu diary

Whenever I read the local papers these days, I find myself skimming through the news about events close to home, having a quick glance at the opinion pieces and letter pages. Then I move on quickly to the bits which don't bore me stiff. Mostly they're the bits about Silvio Berlusconi's serial gaffes, the cartoon strip or those curious snippets of news about poisoned rhino horns or bumbling thieves depositing their loot with the owners of the stolen items.

As an avid newspaper reader I couldn't quite fathom why I had developed such a disinterest in the reporting of local events and commentators' views about them. I might be suffering from a case of excessive election news fatigue, of course. There's just so much about a single topic or event that one can take without it losing its interest value. The same applies to the Labour leadership race. Now that a dozen or so people have announced their candidature and that we have gone through their every utterance with a fine tooth comb, I'm beginning to find the coverage given to the contest less than riveting. And before anyone chides me for being irresponsible and disinterested in who our potential prime minister may be, I felt precisely the same way about the last PN leadership tussle.

No, the reason I was tuning out to what's in the papers is that it all seems so dull, so repetitive. I kept on getting the feeling that I had read or heard it before. The question was where? In the very same newspapers published 10 years ago, that's where. Leafing through the yellowing pages of the 1998 edition, I read the same kind of articles, written by the same writers about much the same topics that we're discussing today. It's as if Malta has been caught in a time warp where we keep banging on about the same things that made the headlines a decade ago. Let's have a look and see if I'm right.

Start with the disappointing stuff first. In December 1998, the Birdlife president brought up Malta's illegal hunting situation with the Berne Convention Steering Committee. One EU accession and thousands of protesting letters and dead birds later, we're still at square one. And this week, we get a special mention in The Times of London which dedicates a leader entitled 'Fowl play: Malta's annual slaughter of migrating birds must be halted'. Now you can simply dismiss Britain as the nation which produced Victoria Beckham and packs of cruel fox-hunters. Or you can simply wake up to the facts about hunting in spring. Knowing us, we'll continue weighing the pros and cons for another 10 years.

Back to the papers, and to an article written by Leo Brincat about 'The Xarabank experience'. He was describing an episode of the programme broadcast after the 1998 budget. He stated that there seemed to be some audience-rigging with most of the people present being big PN fans and hostile to the Labour exponents on the show. Brincat wrote, "As one intervention monotonously followed the other, the 'audience' sang the praises of the recently launched budget as well as of the government of the day".

I have no recollection of the edition that Brincat was complaining about but he may just as well have been talking about a Xarabank programme last year. A woman from the audience stood up to pose her 'impromptu' question to the Prime Minister or the Nationalist figure on the stage. She reeled off an embarrassing euology which she seemed to have learned by rote, pausing from time to time to catch her breath. I switched over to another channel, hoping to catch Striscia La notizia, the teleshopping channel, or even the dreaded Teletubbies - anything to make me forget the obviously rehearsed speech of the woman. I found it see-through and annoying. It's the same sort of thing which irked Brincat ages ago and which keeps on irking the Labour Party.

That's understandable. What's not understandable is why it hasn't done anything about it. If a major political party perceives bias, audience-planting or selective editing on a programme which has extensive viewership, why doesn't it address the situation? It's got the resources to compete with that programme. If it doesn't want to go down that route then it should arm its exponents with information about the topics being discussed so they can argue fluently about it.

It could also engage in a bit of audience selection itself. In other words, it could try to address the problem head-on instead of expecting the soft-glove treatment from media personalities who are more inclined towards another party. Incidentally, one edition of Xarabank in 1998 was dedicated to the subject of gossip. I wonder how many variations on the theme there have been along the years. Not half as many as those dedicated to dodgy fortune-tellers I bet.

More things that never change. On December 8, 1998, the then Health Minister Louis Deguara announced that a national breast-screening programme would be in place in three years' time. He explained that it could not start up in 1998 because there was a shortage in consultants and specialists in radiology. The three-year target date has come and gone and no national screening programme was implemented. The pledge to implement one has been carried forward to the PN's 2008 electoral manifesto.

There were other amusing incidents and news items which could be published tomorrow and not look out of place. The same issues we argued about years ago are still the ones we're talking about now.

Problems we should have got to grips with aeons ago are still dominating the national agenda. And yet we keep regurgitating them endlessly. No wonder my eyes glaze with boredom when I read yet another item about media bias, leadership contests, dirty beaches and unfulfilled electoral promises.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt