Radio Activity

Unless they are very, very careful, some people risk turning their programme into a tragicomedy.

This may happen for several reasons. If it's an interview or a magazine programme and they are unprepared, the chances are that they will fluff and then try to cover it up. You can catch the smirks on the faces of the guests if it's on television, or the giggle in their voices if it's on radio. Some of them are known to flutter their hands, jump up and down on their chairs, ask their panels "tell me - what shall we talk about?" seconds before the red light goes on.

Then there are the newscasters who switch to automatic pilot the moment they begin broadcasting. The other day we were told that il-Mexxej Socjalista Joseph Muscat had been to a peer conference. The newscaster tried to cover up her mistake by repeating the phrase Il-Mexxej tal-Partit Laburista several times, when all she had to do was excuse herself and say what she ought to have said in the first place. So much, then, for removing the 'Malta Labour Party' appellation.

Then there are the presenters who, when they are not dedicating records to dead people or family members or personal friends, tell us to write to the management to tell them how much we like the music they play. If we don't, we are not to say anything at all.

Inevitably, the One people had a field day with the e-mail mistakenly sent to one of them (and I make no distinction between the political party and the station, on purpose), by Paul Borg Olivier. The issue has been elevated to one of red alert proportions, with words straight out of John le Carré spy fiction.

For all that, I am somewhat glad that the new PN general secretary is finally taking an interest in what is going on around him. When he was still merely a mayor, I had sent him two e-mails mentioning specific dates, times, and places, and I had not even received an acknowledgement.

Someone else who appears to have recently taken a good look around and found things amiss is the Children's Commissioner, Carmen Zammit. Since I took over this column, I have been complaining about the selfsame things.

There is the attitude of the majority of children's programmes presenters, for starters, some of whom have access to children in classrooms. They think that walking into one and cajoling children to badger their parents to allow them to 'be on television' is the way to go about things. I have known overindulgent parents carpool to follow this through, which inevitably gave rise to some hard feelings when some children were purposely left out of the trip.

And what did the children get out of this? They were made to 'participate' as 'audience'. Sometimes, to add insult to injury, the programmes included precocious children dressed in quasi-pornographic gear, performing dances or singing songs that were thoroughly age-inappropriate, under the umbrella term 'talent shows'. Most of us watch children's ballroom dancing galas on foreign television stations and the children are always attired in tasteful costumes that are not revealing.

Some children, on the other hand, who are utterly devoid of talent, which has nothing to do with the 'practice makes perfect' mantra, are allowed the limelight - and fail miserably in their task.

Station management and producers excuse themselves by saying, with a wry smile, that they no longer have to scrape the bottom of the barrel. The dregs are offered to them on a silver platter by pushy parents of the same ilk as those who drag their child from one modelling contest to another - in between drama, dance, and music lessons.

I find it weird that the Broadcasting Authority comes down like the proverbial tonne of bricks on people who overrun their allotted time for advertisements, but allow these insults to tomorrow's voting generation go on and on. If the people responsible for this drive cannot regulate themselves 'because that is what the public wants', then someone else must do it for them, thereby teaching the public the value of selective viewing.

In any case, children have no business to be on television - or even watching it - when there are better, more interactive things to do.

A recent study by the US National Institutes of Health, Yale University and the California Pacific Medical Centre points out that all monitors have long-lasting, harmful effects on children's health (this includes cellular phones); and the gamut of problems ranged from short attention spans, obesity, poor school performance and smoking.

NIH bioethicist Dr Ezekiel Emanuel was quoted as saying that "...it was probably more a matter of quantity than actual content... We have a media-saturated life right now in the 21st century. And reducing the number of hours of exposure is going to be a big issue."

Let's not forget that past studies showed the correlation between watching television at toddlerhood and obesity traits appearing at seven years of age. Away from these shores, is it not amusing that China is considering a new press law suggested by Hu Jintao, the Chinese President, to ease the restrictions on Chinese journalists by the Ministry of Propaganda?

Moreover, on a recent visit to the offices of the People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party, Mr Hu said that "(the latest) large-scale public incidents should be accurately, objectively and uniformly reported, with no tardiness, deception, incompleteness or distortion."

Incredibly, China has admitted publicly that almost 90,000 riots occur in the country each year (http://tinyurl.com/5md245).