Salman Rushdie once wrote: "What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirise all orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art dies, a little of what makes us human."

In a recent television programme dealing with the local banning of the play Stitching, it was clear to me that nothing is more distant from this imagination that Rushdie speaks of than the great moralising force that is television.

Popular Maltese television cannot escape its complicity with the audience it needs to keep itself alive. In fact, it can only survive by circumventing the challenges, ambiguities and doubts that characterise the arts. Local television can refer to, quote out of context and hence banalise a controversial play, but it will never shock its audience in quite the same way as a controversial piece of art might.

Why not? Because, as French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu taught us in the mid-1990s, television constantly adapts itself to the mentality of its audience. Programmes like these essentially confirm the conservative tastes of a conservative public; they challenge no orthodoxies, change nothing, and definitely never tell people what they do not want to hear.

If a programme consistently challenged the public's preconceptions - as art does so often - the grand audience ratings it brags about would suffer as a result, and its power in relation to other cultural products like print journalism and the arts would be greatly diminished. In other words, television would lose its cultural and commercial monopoly.

Maltese television cannot avoid political correctness because this is its most potent, hidden and hypocritical weapon. Consequently, television is also the most dominant form of censorship, because - unlike art - it cannot afford to air ideas that are not easily communicable and digestible. There is no place for the historic revolutions of art and literature on Maltese television (unless they are rendered more palatable by being presented in documentaries or biographies); as Bourdieu wrote, quoting another Frenchman, "André Gide used to say that worthy sentiments make bad literature. But worthy sentiments certainly make for good audience ratings."

This is why Maltese TV presenters will continue to invite priests to offer us moral advice on virtually every topic under the sun; this is why 'culture' in Malta is so often defined in the past tense, as a historical 're-enactment' or a revival of forgotten folkloristic games. This is also why the 'common good' is the buzzword in local discussions about polemical subjects like divorce. The 'democratic' environment of such television programmes only serves to hide the fact that local television can only conform to what is already known in advance. Its guests can speak about a 'dangerous' play (and apparently escape the consequences of the law in the process) but the play itself is unlawful. Something like that can only happen because television is considered a 'safe' place to be: a sanctuary for harmless and mind-dulling simulations of democracy.

Art can afford to (indeed, it must) offend common sense - this is its freedom, as Rushdie wrote. Maltese television cannot, because this would disconnect it from the self-serving alliances it has nurtured over the years. This essential difference is perhaps the Maltese artist's only consolation, and simultaneously his or her most disheartening frustration.

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