Keep it clean

Media guru Andrew Azzopardi has every reason to lament the current deterioration in the standard of political debate on both radio and television.

At a time when the country is fast moving towards a general election, politicians on both sides of the House seem to find it more convenient to turn discussions into an unnecessarily heated exchange based on persistent interruptions, pompous gesticulations and an obvious determination to do everything except sticking to the programme theme and giving straightforward answers to straightforward questions.

There will be those who insist this is nothing new on the local political scene and they are more or less right. Those of us who have been in the media for the past 50 years know the signals only too well. Politicians know that whatever is going on in the social network, it is their performance in a given programme that will eventually hold sway even if, ironically, it is then shown again and reinterpreted all over that very same network, for the usual sanguine wisdom of hindsight views.

Radio and TV presenters, even the most experienced among them who think they’ve seen it and done it all, are never totally prepared for such rowdy and frustrating spectacles. While it is certainly not new, there is a telling twist to it – politicians today die a faster death. It is why they would rather talk about the moon when asked about the sun as it is so much easier to interrupt your political opponent rather than letting him or her effectively drive a point home. Sadder still, however, is when this becomes part of a party strategy, as seems to be the case with the Nationalist Opposition. Not that some government speakers have been too docile.

The inevitable re-emergence of this phenomenon, mixed and matched with today’s trend for fake news and fake everything that is not according to one’s own standpoint, is not restricted to Malta or Maltese politics, of course.

Anyone who found the time to watch the five top candidates in France’s presidential election in their first televised debate last week cannot have missed how the two moderating hosts were unable to control the discussion ( sic). They allowed candidates – the two favourites, independent centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right Marine Le Pen, conservative Francois Fillon, socialist Benoit Hamon and far-left Jean-Luc Melenchon – to speak over each other and run well over time.

While this is hardly shocking to Maltese viewers and listeners, perhaps the only redeeming moment of this much-awaited French debate