As Labour turns the national broadcaster into its own theatre of propaganda, the remaining political programmes that one could watch with a standard television license are the ones on the political party broadcasts. Then there is the option of Karl Borg Bonaci who doesn’t even know the difference between the words “partial” and “impartial”. On the internet, the latest trends of media mass-consumption are led by the likes of LovinMalta and Andrew Azzopardi.
The only decent political show, conducted by an actual journalist who knows his job well is broadcast against payment by a major local communications company, and the programme is called Il-Kaลผin and is hosted by Jon Mallia. This situation is extremely problematic.
As Labour has induced the mass proliferation of brain-rot, including with publicly-funded newspapers with MaltaToday, actual media and quality journalism needs to be sold at a higher price to survive. Effectively, what is happening is that popular trash-media, and publicly-funded brain-rot, has proliferated so extensively and so widely that it is also serving as a major barrier against actual media.
In order to have a clearer picture of the situation, one can describe the Labour government as filling the mass media market with garbage to the extent of oversaturating it with its product, effectively outpricing all the small market participants.
The government is obliged to apply and fulfill the latest European Directive on media standards, effectively obliging it to be transparent on public funding for media. Major press outlets like MaltaToday who fully depend on government funding are obviously against this. However, the application of this directive will bring many positive results.
Public media funding should serve the public and this is why if it has to exist, it should be at the use of media outlets that provide a public service, as opposed to providing entertainment or serving as propaganda props. The Labour government’s interest is to proliferate the media landscape with rubbish and brain-rot so that it has more effective control over the political discourse: by and large it has been very successful in doing this. Changing the media landscape and disrupting the ongoing brain-rot will eventually create a more mature and level-headed political arena as the discourse improves.
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Historian and Publisher
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