The Broadcasting Authority has fined Television Malta €1,164 after finding that an edition of the discussion programme Bondiplus broke political impartiality rules.

But PBS said it would be seeking a judicial review of the decision, which programme presenter Lou Bondì also slammed, saying it was "a total disgrace".

Mr Bondì said all legal remedies would be used to redress the decision and a PBS spokesman said it was considering seeking redress in the Constitutional Court.

The broadcasting watchdog said it had acted upon a charge by its own CEO and pointed out that the only guest on the March 8 programme about the government's activity over the last two years was Deputy Prime Minister Tonio Borg.

A substantial part of the programme, it said, consisted of features on projects and initiatives the government had launched.

"In the BA's opinion, these features were nothing other than the promotion of government activity, with no effort to have a critical analysis," he said.

During the interview with Dr Borg, the presenter raised some points of criticism, the BA said, but this was only a feeble attempt to establish some sort of impartiality and did not balance out the features or make up for the lack of participation of people holding different views.

In his reaction, Mr Bondì described the BA decision as "unjust and discriminatory", saying 38 per cent of the programme was about the problems of the Nationalist Party's backbench.

"During the programme, I asked a total of 26 hard-hitting questions to Dr Borg and the features on what the government accomplished during the first two years of office were purely and totally factual," he said.

"It is also worth pointing out that the Labour Party did not complain about the programme to the BA," he said, adding the issue would "not stop here".

He said it was significant that the authority never issued accusations of the sort against Bondiplus in cases where Opposition Leader Joseph Muscat was alone in the studio in 2008 and Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi in 2009, without anyone from the opposing party being interviewed.

The chairman of the PBS editorial board and former BA chairman Joe Pirotta said he was dumbfounded by the decision, describing it as "absolutely unbelievable".

The BA, he said, appeared to have sent broadcasting practice in Malta back to the 1980s when every programme had its own balance calculated in exact minutes and seconds.

Through its decision, the authority had disregarded current European legal and broadcasting practices by failing to apply local legislation, which provided that balance should be seen as a whole in a series of programmes.

"In this particular case, it is even more incredulous that the BA, if it truly feels it was correct on this occasion, failed to take action in a number of other instances where prominent political personalities featured on their own in other programmes. We have had cases where leaders and prominent officials of both parties appeared alone."

Prof. Pirotta said he was also perturbed because the authority had failed to take action against news items on other stations that were "blatantly incorrect" in spite of the fact that this was pointed out and it was its primary duty to ensure that only actual news was broadcast.

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