I wonder if the National Council for Radio and Television (ESR) really thought about their decision to call the receivers Snik, Toquel and Rack over their words, which the watchdog described as “full hatred and images of violence”? The question here is not just about the very reasonable concerns about censorship that have been expressed in this newspaper and on other platforms regarding this decision. It is also about the violation of the artist’s privacy. To explain…
The National Council for Radio and Television stopped making its public decisions last summer. The state has a transparency website, Diavgeia, where one can find out how many rolls of toilet paper the independent authority has bought and from whom, and how much it spends on staff transport, but there is no way to find out about the key. as part of his job, meaning what decisions he made about the radio and television programs he supervises.
The last decision we could find related to a show broadcast in the morning prime time slot in January 2019 by the Open Beyond channel, with a category 2 warning (parental guidance advice ). The decision was reached in 2023 and published in June 2024, and included the name of the show and the person hosting it. The delay seems to stem from the fashionable conversation about privacy.
It seems that ESR members were concerned about whether and to what extent the publication of their findings breached the privacy – yes, we are talking about the privacy of people on our television screens. all day All sorts of great ideas were considered when these concerns were raised. One of them suggested not publishing the name of the host of the TV show or the show, but only the station on which the break was noted.
But what about the reasoning behind the decision? An explanation of who said what to encourage such disregard for the “privacy” of individuals who are in public view every day? I guess the authority has to make the fines public without any explanation as to why.
For years, we have written that making a criminal charge against someone is a public act and not the private matter of the accused. “When someone is arrested and charged, it’s not just a private matter for them. A public prosecution authority is doing it. In other words, even if we were not supposed to know who was arrested, we must know who the public authorities arrested so that those authorities, at least , under democratic control,” Kathimerini wrote in 2007.
Now, it seems, the absence of hiding public information is to extend to the decisions of the National Council for Radio and Television.
