Malta’s Parliament is on Monday planning to fast-track the approval of a new broadcasting law that could kill off independent news and current affairs programmes online.

The law prohibits online news and current affairs programmes from having sponsors, product placement or pop-up advertising, placing internet shows under the direct regulation of the Broadcasting Authority.

Sponsorships and product placement are the only ways of paying for such shows since online video-sharing platforms like Facebook do not allow media producers to include 30-second ads the way advertising is sold on TV.

The law is the result of EU Directive 2018/1808, which seeks to create a level playing field between traditional TV companies and online audiovisual platforms, after heavy lobbying by big TV corporations who were feeling the pinch of advertising money being spent online.

Maltese legislators never fought for an exemption for Malta despite the island having a media landscape that is heavily in favour of traditional TV companies since they are either State-owned and State-funded or directly owned by political parties which sell advertising for political influence.

Malta’s broadcasters have various funds at their disposal and in the case of One TV and Net TV, they are also permitted, by design, to break laws on impartiality, despite these being set in our Constitution.

Besides this, both politically-owned stations never publish their annual accounts and have never been penalised for not doing so.

Just yesterday, the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom noted that that Malta’s media faces ‘high risk’ threats when it comes to independence and pluralism since the largest media platforms are owned by political parties.

Apart from working in a hostile environment which in 2017 saw the assassination of Maltese journalist, local media producers who are facing financial burdens that have worsened with Covid-19, must now also contend with additional loss of funding.

Maltese legislators have not proposed any solutions to this EU directive.

A two-week consultation process about this law was only held by Minister Carmelo Abela in May after the EU directive was imposed and online media producers were never informed about it.

The committee which will discuss the law on Monday includes Abela, Rosianne Cutajar and Jean Claude Micallef (who recently also proposed imposing a warrant on journalists). The Nationalist MPs include Therese Comodini Cachia, Claudette Buttigieg and Karl Gouder.

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