Censorship Consultation, May 16th Deadline

national | arts and media | event notice Thursday May 11, 2006 15:51 by Bren

The BCI claim its not censorship if they ask interested parties to contribute

The BCI are running a consultation with the public on program standards that will apply to all radio and television broadcasters licensed in the State. Their advertising campaign blurb is that 'it's not censorship if you decide'. In my opinion its still censorship when one group of people decides what others can watch. However i have decided for myself that right now the best way to ensure that things don't get too draconian is to take part. If the only people who take part are some secret Mary Whitehouse fanclub then things could get very boring.

Just in case anyone has missed the television advertising campaign on this consultation i thought this would be a good forum to mention it. The advert has a few frames which try to convey menace and the underlying dangers of the portrayal of violence on TV as if these are the most malign of influences that TV serves up to us every day. Just in case we couldn't decide for ourselves what we should be worried about the ad signposts what they consider to be the blackspots. After telling us what we should consider banning they then claim that its not censorship if they ask a few concerned citizens what they think before they get to work.

Just what sort of concerned citizen will respond is pretty obvious, those who worry too much about violence on TV, and i think we can guess just what they will want to do about it. A quick visit to the BCI website shows just how wide they wish to cast their net as the consultation will help decide ' on rules and principles which pertain to certain types of programme material, including violence, sexual conduct, coarse language, portrayal of persons and groups in society, and the portrayal of drugs, alcohol and solvent abuse.' Now i think we can all agree that if you went all they way in those areas that you would end up with some very restrictive rules, the least that would happen is that podge and rodge would have to return to the Den to help hawk program length commercials to the kids based on the latest toys being developed.

So i decided that i better take part in this consultation to try and ensure that next halloween the scariest thing they are allowed show isn't an old episode of murder she wrote. Off I went and looked up their website www.bci.ie and found their consultation document and response form. Now they haven't made it easy, the document is in acrobat so if you want to have a good long read of it you'll have to print it out if you don't want to spend hours online. Once you've waded through that though the response form isn't too bad and you can email it back to them. I must admit it takes some time but on the other hand it's worth it to ensure that after paying my licence fee there will actually be something i want to watch on TV.

Now if only they would consult us on what they should do about the inherent political and economic bias of certain television stations, hardly likely. It seems that all thats on offer are the easy and popular targets of sex and violence.

The deadline for returning your response is Tuesday May 16th so get to work to ensure a more varied TV future where you decide what you want to watch by merely changing channel.

Its all happening here,