Journalists' and broadcasters' duty to be objective, factual and impartial must be respected even when a particular station is owned by a political party, Nationalist MP Francis Zammit Dimech said during the continuation of the second reading of the Bill to amend the Broadcasting Act.

He said the Broadcasting Authority was known to be intent on giving new directives in this context, so that the truth would never be bent.

Dr Zammit Dimech said broadcasting was part and parcel of modern life.

The Bill was meant to make the Broadcasting Authority the issuer of broadcasting licences, with the technical side of satellite communications frequencies being handled by the Malta Communications Authority while the BA covered programme content.

This would make for a more harmonised operation.

In present-day Malta the people could not help attaching great importance to broadcasting. Even in recent months independent journalists and broadcasters had been the targets of vicious attacks simply for not agreeing with the Labour Party, leading people to doubt the value that the party attached to broadcasting.

Broadcasting had a role in a cultural context because it was a means of social communication. There must be a code of ethics to seriously regulate it, and the people must be taught to be critical of different treatments of facts.

Modern society needed this facility more than ever, he concluded.