There was a time when Rediffusion’s head of programmes, Victor Aquilina, used to go on air weekly with his programme Inwieġbu Lis-Semmiegħa (‘Replying to Listeners’). Michael Vella Haber took this up on One Radio too for a while.

Apart from these two gentlemen, as far as I know other media personalities have relied on the media and social sites to get their views across to the general public.

Last week, without any doubt, the most illustrious guest on Lilian Maistre’s Familja Waħda (‘One Family’) magazine programme was Anton Attard, CEO of PBS.

As could have been expected, he was hit with a barrage of calls from the usual suspects and also from an inordinate number of new listeners – proof enough that there is a desire, and a need, for this type of programme.

Many of the calls covered the usual platitudes, but there was some wheat among the chaff.

Instead of non-stop music at night, there are envisaged repeats of the aforementioned Familja Waħda and other selected programmes.

There will be an attempt to make news bulletins more user-friendly by (and this is my opinion, not Attard’s) making sure the syntax of the vernacular is respected, and that words are not coined for the nonce just because a journalist could not be bothered to find out whether there already exists a Maltese word to describe a concept, an action or a noun, as is sadly the case so often.

It was interesting to note that Attard did not comment about how the plug-ugly facade of Rediffusion House was kept since it is ‘scheduled’. But I was pleased to note that he scotched the myth that PBS receives all the income from everyone’s television licences. I have heard this too often, usually when someone is slating a programme on one of the ‘stations of the nation’.

The public must know that PBS must seek to garner its own income, since what the state offers as a subsidy is only inasmuch as is needed to cover the programmes produced under the Public Service Obligations laws.

• The Labour Party has come out all guns blazing against the appointment of Anthony Tabone as chairman-appointed chairman of the Broadcasting Authority.

I had a feeling this was mostly not connected with the fact that he had been appointed chairman of the Public Broadcasting Services Ltd in 2000 (a position he held for three years), but because his CV includes, “acted as consultant in strategy and communications to a communication agency on two EC campaigns”.

I would say this stance is the one usually adopted by the two major political parties when anyone with links to the ‘other side’ is appointed to a public position.

We have seen this attitude several times; the general idea behind it is to place a person on the defensive, hoping to fluster him into making defensive decisions and/or wrong moves. This approach veers from the mere ‘we are watching you’ to the downright intimidating.

What effect it will have evidently depends upon who’s doing the action and the person at the other end of the stick.

Indeed, Kurt Farrugia of the PL reminded me that this political appointment is unacceptable because, “Tabone was chairman at PBS during the EU campaign. The Malta-EU Information Centre, which was government’s EU-info wing, started airing propaganda spots about the EU. The PL wanted its share of spots to counter MIC’s.”

The BA found in favour of the PL, awarding the PL the right to one third of the number of spots that the MIC was allotted.

Tabone had objected to this, declaring that the PBS board of directors did not agree with the BA’s decision. After all, PBS was receiving payment for the spots, as was Net – and the PL had not gone after the latter to broadcast its spots, because, probably (my opinion, not that of Tabone), Net usually preached to the converted so it would have been money down the proverbial drain.

More of the same followed, at a time, as I recall when most of us were actually sick of the word Ewropa anyway. It seemed to me that propaganda from both sides of the political divide began disusing itself thinly as infomercials, and as such, was lumped on PBS during prime advertising time, losing it revenue, when, at the same time, someone was standing around with a stopwatch to compare the time given on news bulletins to PN and PL activities. Can you get more puerile than that?

This, by the way, is something that still needs to be addressed nowadays – especially as we are in the run-up to general elections. I do not see the point of being told what so-and-so said in a political party club just so that positive discrimination is applied.

Meanwhile, friends of mine who have worked – in different capacities, in different places – with Tabone vouch for the integrity of his modus operandi.

• “They knocked me down to the ground with their guns, AK-47s. I was down on my knees and I heard them cocking their guns. I was on the floor on my side, hands and feet cuffed, lying half on a mattress, and they were beating me. I thought they were going to shoot me. It was a fake execution.”

Unfortunately, most newsrooms in Malta chose to translate this as ‘ġew imsawta’ – which is a far cry from what really happened to the BBC journalists in Libya.

The psychological aspect of hearing a gun cocked at your ear was completely ignored; this is what happens when news is fed into Google Translate from the equivalent of a tele-printer.

television@timesofmalta.com