Spatial relationships

One of my pet theories is that someone, somewhere, is holding a stop-watch in his hand each time a PBS news bulletin goes on air, be it on TVM or on Radju Malta. And during high visibility week for Natalino Fenech, news editor for PBS, I was proven correct.

Fenech came out, guns blazing, to negate a headline in L-Orizzont that gave statistics on the different amounts of airtime accorded to thePL and PN by the stations of the nation.

Soon after, Fenech was a guest on Lilian Maistre’s Familja Waħda, where he again explained why it’s not true that what we pay as television licences goes into PBS coffers; an issue that has been done to death several times, but rises, phoenix-like each time general or local council elections are less than halfway due.

Fenech could not resist reminding us of how “most people” prefer to watch TVM news than the broadcasts of any other station; apparently he chose not to consider that this was a default thing.

More surreal was Joe Dimech and Peter Cossai’s conversation during Newsline, (Radju Malta) last Wednesday on the conflagration at the Verdala area warehouse.

Dimech, trying but failing to be funny, said this surely was not on the news department’s diary. Cossai, in a similar vein, said that had it been, they would have turned up with the Outside Broadcasting Unit.

However, most people would know that TVM had not bothered to do the aforementioned live filming gig with regard to the footage of dare-devil diving. As did other stations, they simply lifted a clip off Youtube.

And just as footage of insurrection in London led to copycat riots, this untoward publicity has led to several wannabe stuntmen trying to mimic the original divers. Inevitably, some of them came a cropper, and cost the state a pretty penny in man-hours and rescue services.

The more attention that is accorded to these potentially suicidal thrill-seekers, the more likely that there will be copycats. This is not a question of crediting the source versus plagiarism – it is merely what one expects of a professional station.

For all that, I must say that I appreciate the fact that Fenech has twice within one week taken the bull by the horns – unlike other bigwigs in all radio and television stations who hide behind their press relations officers, secretaries and sundry underlings, and let them take the flak.

There was a time when Victor Aquilina had a weekly programme on Rediffusion, and Michael Vella Haber had a similar one on Super One Radio, but apart from these people, the general praxis appears to be having leaks planted here and there, or management by crises.

This, of course, brings us to the E22 question. It is being rumoured that not all the employees will be integrated into PBS, except for a handful. The rest will be redeployed in the Education Department.

If this is because there is no place for public servants with different working hours from the rest of the staff at PBS, one may ask whether E22 staff have been given the choice to sign alternative contracts, and whether, indeed, these rules will henceforth apply to all PBS staff.

Meanwhile, the Office of the Prime Minister informs us that the Parliamentary Secretariat for Tourism, Environment and Culture has initiated the revision of the National Broadcasting Policy.

A letter has been sent to audiovisual producers; there is also a list of questions pertaining to (i) mission and vision; (ii) boards of PBS; and (iii) independent producers, ad­dress­ed to producers and a copy of the National Broadcasting Policy.

Further information about the policy consultation can e-mail sylvana.mercieca@gov.mt.

• By pure chance, I discovered a site that allows one to view Malta’s television stations: http://swwitv.com/search.php?zoom_query=Malta , and which works well most of the time. This is a boon when the only way to watch your favourite station is streamed, if your television set is on the blink and Salvu cannot make it to your house until next week.

• Is it a presentation officer or a computer that is responsible for placing the recording of the rosary on Radju Malta, right after the 10 p.m. news? On August 12, the wrong set of five decades went out, and last Tuesday, the recitation was not broadcast.

• It is annoying to see crawls of SMSs with bad spelling sent by the public “because it is our praxis not to edit these”. Yet it is worse to see captions with errors, on several programmes.

• The latest ‘television is bad for you’ argument, or, less succinctly, ‘Multi-screen generation: Health fears for children who watch TV while using iPads, phones and laptops’ has made the headlines.

Multi-screen viewing is a mish-mash of watching television, either live or on demand, using social sites (including Skype) and/or surfing the internet during the commercial breaks or the news bulletins, using hand-held gaming computers and/or laptops, iPads, smartphones, mobile telephones, and laptops.

Let us remember that most of the aforementioned may be done concomitantly, and that using even just two screens that flicker at different rates concurrently may lead to migraines, or even epileptic seizures. Then, of course, there are the risks of mental health problems and obesity obtaining in those with such sedentary behaviour

All this is still happening despite the alleged ‘social media fatigue’ that says one in four young people are bored with social networking sites

To think that some of us used to worry when our children’s teachers slotted in a videocassette while they ate their school lunches, ‘to keep them from chattering’.

television@timesofmalta.com