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The PBS editorial board’s comments (10 December 2006) regarding its decision to discontinue the TV programme Skartocc, did more harm than good to its chairman in particular, the other board members, and to the national station, as a whole.
Not only did the board chairman fail to correct the impression your paper could have given readers, as a consequence of his refusal to comment on the matter when he was approached by your journalist, but his statement must have made readers rightly conclude that the editorial board is a board of compromises.
How on earth can one recognise the board as being up to scratch, when the chairman publicly admits that despite the poor standard of the programme in question, he and his board found it so easy to compromise standards, and feed the viewing public with programmes the board itself categorised as being of low quality. Has the board ever thought of drawing up ‘a code of good quality programming’ to guide it in its operations? Or are programmes simply adjudicated at the whim of the individual, depending who the producers are?
Whatever the sequence of events was, any bending backward and forward to accommodate the producers concerned reflects poorly on the true worth of the board, and its efficiency and effectiveness to carry out the job entrusted to them to ensure good quality TV programming.
A responsible board worthy of its salt, and with sound knowledge of the criteria pertaining to good quality programming, would have never retracted from its own adjudication of the programme in question, let alone, enter into haggling with producers, to compromise the very principles the editorial board is supposed to stand for. To add insult to injury, the said compromise had gone up in smoke, leaving the national station in a fix.
I was indeed surprised to read that the board endeavoured to acquire, once again, the programme Il-Kotra to include in this winter’s schedule. I find the standard of production of Il-Kotra equally poor (in more ways than one), if not worse than Skartocc.
Regrettably, the editorial board chairman left me with no other option but to confirm my belief, that his board’s standards of quality programmes is indeed shallow.
“In matters of principle,” Thomas Jefferson once said, “stand like a rock; in matters of taste swim with the current”.
John G. Borg-Bartolo
Attard
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