ineptitude of the broadcast media.

We think it is fair to say that in the days after the election was called, the broadcasting stations did little work of their own and relied heavily on using Royal Gazette stories or reacting to Royal Gazette stories. Election night is the one time when local stations are free of heavy competition from Cable TV.

It was their night and it was a night to shine. Both ZBM and VSB should have done well that night but they were ill-prepared and displayed their general lack of technical and journalistic ability for the whole Country.

ZBM misjudged the time of the returns and came on the air after results were coming in. It stayed behind and ran results consistently behind VSB, while getting the same Election Central results as VSB. There was a general lack of journalistic ability and of preparation at ZBM which showed badly, and an almost total absence of relevant political analysis.

VSB did rather better by getting the results on first but was a technical disaster. It also had bad staff problems. One staffer got the political facts so muddled that he, quite properly, declared himself senile and one commentator clearly lives in another galaxy.

This sad state of affairs has not always been the case. There was a time when this newspaper looked on ZBM and the old ZFB as a serious news challenge. We enjoyed the challenge and the competition was healthy and good for everyone.

These days the radio stations, especially VSB, spend their mornings reading Royal Gazette stories, many of them word for word. Sometimes the stations attribute the stories to "the daily newspaper'', sometimes they do not bother. We have concluded that if a story is in any way controversial, the stations duck and attribute it to the newspaper, otherwise they just happily steal our material. In the afternoon they broadcast some court cases, Government's handouts and the Police report, both of which land on their desk via a fax machine. By evening they have dressed up The Royal Gazette 's stories and gotten some reaction to The Royal Gazette 's morning news. It is perfectly fair to use a Royal Gazette story to build a fresh lead but they seldom do much that is fresh. Their standards are so poor that they seldom do such basic things as offer those attacked on the television a right of reply.

To be fair, in recent months we think that VSB has improved and is, probably, now a better news station than ZBM. It is certainly more balanced than ZBM but suffers from a tendency to some wild reporting.

We think the public deserves better local news gathering and better presentation. We understand that both broadcast stations are financially marginal and we know better than anyone that producing the news costs money.

But it is still sad to see once proud ZBM reduced by penury and ineptitude to amateur status.

As we see it, Bermuda is a highly sophisticated Country being poorly served by the stations. We understand their problems, but we think Bermuda needs a solution.

It may be that there is no room in Bermuda for two commercial broadcast television companies and they will never earn enough to be good news sources again, especially with cable cutting both their audience and their advertising revenue. Staffing a Bermuda newsroom well today is very expensive. The broadcast companies find it expensive to staff badly.

The solution may be an independent broadcasting quango with a good newsroom financed by taxes on the sale of radios and TVs and, perhaps, a tax on the use of cable. We are think of an independent radio and TV station of good quality broadcasting for Bermuda. It can be done and Bermuda deserves such service.