The radio station continues to be an uphill battle. The managers of the newscast have done a good job of working with the reporters to do more interesting stories. But the overall quality of the main 1:30 broadcast is still very poor. Today the staff missed the deadline for printing the script and a power failure in the newsroom five minutes before the broadcast left the announcer with no choice but to say, "Due to technical problems the 1:30 news is not ready." Then the producers ran in with a script.
Keep in mind that the engineer of the broadcast and the announcer of the broadcast are not from the news department. They just read and air whatever is handed to them. The above picture shows the non-news announcer reading a presidential press release word for word, WITH THE PAPER FOLDED OVER SO THAT I WOULD NOT SEE THE PRESIDENTIAL LOGO ON THE SCRIPT. However, I have now heard enough of these things that I know what they sound like and snapped this picture while she was reading.We have spent over a month here recommending improvements to the broadcast that have not been acted upon. The music is inappropriate for a news program. News should be read by journalists and not whichever warm body happens to be available from the programming side. Press releases from the government should not be read on the air verbatim and presented as news. Even a simple thing like getting an audio feed from the weather department is ignored. There is really no point to the team making any further recommendations until we know that radio WANTS to improve.
2 comments:
Sounds like you had a bad day with the radio news. Can't imagine the frustrations of trying to instill a true sense of journalism when there is no background upon which to build. Whatever you get done will be better than what is there now and at least there seems to be a sense of wanting something better among the Maldivians.
Thanks Paul, these are good people and the forward-thinking ones WANT to change. Unfortunately, some of the higher ups in radio have too much invested in the present system, especially because everyone here is somehow related by blood or politics. It's hard to shake off 30 years of baggage in a couple of weeks, but we'll keep trying.
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