WATCH: News presenter struggles with FAKE live-link to Castille Square

For Saturday’s coverage of Robert Abela’s cabinet reshuffle, the government broadcaster PBS chose to stage a fake ‘live’ talk between its journalists.

Maria Muscat, presenting the 8pm news from TVM’s ugly studio in Gwardamanġa, struggled to fit her questions into a rolling recording of Glen Falzon.

Although Glen Falzon’s reporting came with heavy audio asynchrony, the technical issue was not a delay in transmission between Castille Square and the studio.

The reporter started to answer seconds before Maria Muscat finished her questions, revealing that she was in fact talking to a recording.

In the recording, Falzon can be seen slightly nodding his head while leaving breaks for the presenter’s questions, which Muscat didn’t manage to ask in time.

Pre-recorded conversations between anchors and reporters are common practice in television, but are usually announced as such.

Instead, the producers of Saturday’s 8pm news bulletin tried to mislead viewers by labelling the report as a live broadcast.

Find out more about the practices at Malta’s government broadcaster in our new PBSWATCH series on Wednesdays.