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As
against the blow hot blow cold milieu in India, censorship guidelines
for television in most other countries are clearly laid down and
stringently applied.
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| A scene from 'Sex and the City' |
Singapore,
for instance, has a Censorship Review Committee (CRC) which reviews
the policies and guidelines on regulation of media content, reviewed
every decade. The latest guidelines, released last month, after
a comprehensive public survey and 13 focus group consultations,
have one major change - Sex and the City, not allowed thus
far, can now air on cable television in Singapore post the watershed
mark of 10 pm, though it remains unclear whether sexually explicit
scenes will be cut or not. Apart from this, the CRC also belts shows,
which means it confines screening or broadcast time of particular
sensitive content to late at night or early in the morning to keep
it away from unintended viewers.
In
Hong Kong, family viewing hours are determined as the period between
the hours of 4 pm and 8:30 pm on any day, during which time nothing
which is unsuitable for children should be shown. Hong Kong's Family
Viewing Policy assumes that there is a progressive decline in the
proportion of children present in the audience throughout the evening.
After 8:30 pm, parents are expected to share responsibility for
what their children are permitted to watch.
The country also makes it clear that apart from violence, factors
like bad language, innuendo, sex and nudity, scenes of extreme distress,
the deliberate use of horror for its own sake, morbid sound effects
intended to anticipate or simulate death or injury, the use of the
supernatural or superstition so as to arouse anxiety or fear, torture,
cruelty to children or animals, any matter likely to lead to hysteria,
nightmares or other undesirable emotional disturbances in children
and the use of crude slang are to be deleted.
Programmes based on or pertaining to fortune-telling, feng-shui,
occultism, astrology, phrenology, palm-reading, numerology, mind-reading,
character-reading, spiritualism are also a no-no in that country.
Similar
constraints bind Western television. While an International Herald
Tribune quotes Markus von Luttitz, marketing director for the
German television channel GIGA as saying, "Freedom to show
breasts is far more lax in Europe than in America." But he
feels the German objection to violence may be "bordering on
censorship." France too shares Germany's attitude toward violence
in the media. The IHT report quotes Benedicte Mathieu, a
media writer for Le Monde, "In France, you don't see
dead bodies on TV, even on the news." Cruelty to animals is
also forbidden fare. Mathieu says that French networks declined
to broadcast the infamous Taliban video of poison gases being tested
on dogs - a video that CNN showed ceaselessly for days on end, the
IHT report points out.
France
has a relatively centralized regulatory system, whose decisions
govern both public and paid channels, and it has recently spearheaded
an effort to eradicate television porn. The IHT report quotes Mathieu
as saying she believes that the changes are due largely to the current
French administration's fear of an increasingly conservative political
climate.
In
Britain, it's a relatively free environment as regards language.
The report quotes Robin Hull, communications manager for the Broadcasting
Standards Commission (a related organisation), as saying, "When
they show The Osbournes in the U.K., they don't bleep out
the swearing. In America, however, MTV does bleep it out. We do
sometimes get complaints, but here we have more of an attitude that
audiences should know what to expect when they're watching a show
like that."
The
British regulatory system also has the so-called 9 pm watershed
- after which it is nearly no holds are barred. The Independent
Television Commission, which oversees affairs, also has strict guidelines
about child safety, ideas for including disabled people in broadcasting
and film, among other matters. The ITC, following viewers' complaints,
has also got broadcasters to apologise for showing certain programmes
at 'unsuitable' times and ensuring that channels impose self-restrictions
to ensure such errors do not recur.
In
practice, Australian television is considerably more relaxed about
sex and coarse language than American networks. In the late 1990s,
TV networks began allowing the word "f---" to go to air,
particularly where it was seen as vital to the storyline of a movie.
Next came the memorable episode of Sex And The City where
"c---" was broadcast, although not in regional areas.
By
2002, the Osbournes were f---ing, quite literally, their way through
their reality series on Network Ten, with barely a word bleeped
out, according to a report in The Age. Shown at 8.30 pm five
nights a week in the early '70s, Number 96 drew huge audiences
with its gay characters, sexual assaults and a mysterious knicker-snipper.
Also
read:
"TV channels have disappointed
me by and large" - RS Prasad
"Once you start censoring,
there is no end to it" - Shailaja
Bajpai
"Censorship in India
is an eyewash" - Vinta Nanda
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