The very human side of the news media

Imagine one hot August Sunday afternoon 13 years ago. Everyone is either having the afternoon nap, sun-bathing on the beach or abroad. Lethargy is rampant. It’s the peak of summer. Only a poof fellow, albeit in an air-conditioned environment, is checking and re-checking the radio station’s newsroom fax machine (there was no Internet at the time in Malta) for any breaking news.

With a mere half-an-hour to go for the main news bulletin in the evening, the fax machines rolls back into life. It’s a police report. A woman had died electrocuted in Gozo. Yippee! Something to start the news bulletin with. And the journalist hurriedly worked on the report, happy the day had been saved by the fatal electrocution.

This is no anecdote. I was that part-time cub reporter. Today I have a different outlook on the meaning of life and its loss.

Summer time is very much like Christmas time. There is little work and much more fun. For those, journalists included, who have to work on week-ends, holidays and unfriendly hours, there could be little worse than having to sit down at work, stare at people having a whale of a time, without anything to do.

This has happened to me several times along the years, especially when I was working for media that have daily and hourly deadlines. The latest occurrence I observed was this morning.

Readers who would have tried to take a look at the Maltese online news websites and try to find a tiny little piece of breaking news would have been disappointed. Nothing. Nada. Rien. Xejn. Politicians are taking it very easy except for attending parties and other celebrations related to this season. Business is quite hectic, and the new products/services/stocks have already been announced and promoted weeks ago.

Several enterprises and institutions would have already entertained journalists and other media-related staff for Christmas drinks or sumptuous lunches. Some of these would have made an announcement, but nothing special.

Breaking news becomes a very rare commodity when everyone is thinking in terms of parties and revelry and not how to exploit the fourth estate. There would be the occasional police report about a traffic accidents but the nation-wide campaigns against drink-driving have been paying off in the last few years.

So what can journalists write about apart from the country’s leaders calling for unity and solidarity? Very little. Many a press release, left at the barrel’s end, would be published in toto when otherwise it would have never been considered for publication at other times of the year.

A flair of creativity would do the trick but it is very easy to fall into the trap of the usual reporting on the plight of the homeless, or that child who would be spending Christmas in hospital rather than home.

This brings me to the main point of this entry: who controls the media? Who dictates what is published and what is left out? Sometimes it’s circumstantial. When half the staff-room is on leave, the editor invited to lunch, and the poor part-timer staring on the news desk praying for something to happen, the media is at its weakest. It is passive, waiting for something to happen, and when that happens, there’s the danger it is blown out of proportion because there is nothing else to fill the air-time or the space on the newspapers or web page.

Would it be better for the news media to go on vacation rather than try to fill-in the news space with the scrap and crap? I still haven’t found an answer.

Best wishes to you all. May the news media report more positive and less negative news in 2006.