Ethnicity and representation within the Maltese media industries

Abstract

The media, as Jakubowiez et al. (1994: 7) reiterate, is implicated in core relationships. In this paper, audio-visual texts will be analyzed in order to demystify the manner in which the Gozitan people partake within the media industry within the Maltese islands and find out how they are represented. The focus of textual analysis will be a documentary realist series entitled Ghawdex Ilium (Gozo Today) produced by the Gozitan director-producer Alvin Scicluna. This program is shown on the national broadcasting television Television Malta, every Tuesday at 11.15 p.m. with a repeat transmission on Sunday at 6.05 p.m. Jakubowiez et al. (1994: 3) argue that our sense of what groups in society are and how we conceptualise social difference is often shaped and/or reinforced by labels and divisions transmitted by the mass media. Their argument is that the media product is shaped by various factors, namely the mechanisms of production, recruitment and socialisation of producers as well as the conveyance of the messages concerned. Other factors implicated here are the aesthetic and sociological values that went into the making of the content and the way this product is taken up by the audience/s. Jakubowiez et al. (1994: 7) underline the fact that the various groups that form an audience and their interaction with the media not only play an important part in creating meaning but in/directly play an important part in the shaping of the content. This paper therefore will take the three issues into question, namely the media industry in the Maltese Islands, the product and its producer together with the audience and their in/direct involvement in the textual production.