Much has been written about what led to a landslide victory in the recent elections by the Labour Party, despite the fact that the Prime Minister and his team are under magisterial inquiry for alleged corrupt practices. Also, not to be forgotten, are the reports by the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit which were passed on to the police for action and nothing was done.
How could the electorate give their wholehearted support to the PL team at the polls in this climate? Was the Opposition not reading what the electorate wanted? Did their message not appeal enough?
I maintain that the kernel of the issue is not in the pledges made by both campaigns, not in the apparent clientelism that was rife, nor the appeal of both party leaders and their performances.
The key is in the way the electorate used the media in this election. A survey by The Malta Independent shows that 76.9 per cent followed the campaign through television. This compares to 53.2 per cent who followed on social media. Print, radio and news portals followed with less significant shares.
Social media is compromised by the “echo chamber effect”. Anything you share or subscribe to is only seen by your friends, the extent of which is determined by your own subjective privacy settings. It is not a blanket means of communication putting the message out to all and sundry.
In addition, one would have thought that this would have been the platform of choice for the younger demographic, including the thousands of first-time voters. This survey shows that in the 18-24 age group, a staggering 72.4 per cent said that television and not social media, was their primary news source for the election campaign.
Joseph Muscat’s campaign had control of 56.5 per cent of the televisual message. That is the combined ratings of One and TVM
Liberalisation of broadcasting in 1991 saw the granting of television licences to the country’s only two political parties represented in parliament. Initially, it was the PL which opened its television station and this was followed a few years later, by the PN opening Net TV, when it lost at the polls to Alfred Sant.
If these existed within a healthy and vibrant televisual public sphere, with other independent products available for consumption, their political agendas would be significantly watered down. However, clearly this is not so.
At the top, the board of the regulator is composed of two members appointed by each of the two main political parties, and the chairman, who has the casting vote, is appointed by the party in government, after token consultation. The result is that the regulator itself is politically controlled and cannot objectively carry out its remit in the public interest.
Rather than requiring ethical, unbiased journalism to ensure that we have an informed electorate capable of participating in the democratic process, we are told that the two political party stations balance each other out over time.
The public service broadcaster is wholly owned by the government and political interference by the party in power is notorious, as we have just seen this week with the transfer of the head of programmes. The slant on TVM has become blatant. As the corruption scandals were breaking during the recent campaign, these were not considered to be newsworthy enough to necessitate any coverage by their newsroom.
Did these stories not impinge at all on the electoral process? Did the electorate not have a right to know and a right to then make up their own minds?
Joseph Muscat’s campaign had control of 56.5 per cent of the televisual message. That is the combined ratings of One and TVM. This compares to a paltry 11.3 per cent controlled by the PN through Net TV.
The PL controlled the narrative and anything that was countered or originated by the PN could not compete. When almost 80 per cent of the electorate are using TV as their primary news source, this is far from a level playing field.
In 1998, the then prime minister Eddie Fenech Adami described the politically owned television stations as a “transitional phenomenon”.
The liberalisation of broadcasting did not take the form the PN had intended and needs to be seen in the context of what had happened in the 1980s.
Almost 40 years have gone by and it is high time that we put our democratic process itself at the top of the agenda. We need a democratically regulated televisual public sphere, with an objectively informed electorate capable of participating in it.
Beatrice Gatt holds an MA in Sociology of Media from the University of Leicester.