If we can’t have political ads, why are they asking us to be censors?

YOU only have a week left, you know. If you want to be one of our country’s new breed of censors, it’s time to get your application in because the deadline is next Tuesday.

And who knows, you could end up controlling everything we’re allowed to see and listen to on the radio and the telly.

You’ve heard the ads, I suppose, from the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI). It doesn’t want to be the censor, that’s what the ad says.

It wants you to do the job. It keeps inviting you to send in your views because that’s what will inform the commission when it’s drawing up its code of practice. And what’s this code about?

Taste and decency is what — and sure don’t we all have strong views on that.

I’m surprised it’s been able to run the ads at all. Its sister body, the Broadcasting Complaints Commission (BCC), has already decided ads with any kind of political character shouldn’t be allowed on television or radio.

The BCC is a kind of dictator because when it makes a ruling, there’s no possibility of appeal against it. And it has decided (I wrote about this a few weeks ago) that ads that promote public discussion of policy issues are political ads, and mustn’t be allowed.

RTÉ, naturally, has complied with this ruling, and has forbidden several ads which fall into this new definition of political.

Now, I have to say, I find it hard to imagine a subject more political than censorship (or to use its polite term, a code of conduct on taste and decency). Yet RTÉ is running a series of ads promoting public discussion, and eliciting the views of the public, on that very subject. Seems like one law for the rest of us and one law for the BCI, but let’s leave that to one side.

The real questions we need to ask are different. Should we be worried about trends like this? Is it OK that a Government-appointed body is going to determine what broadcasting standards should be, at least for the broadcasters it controls?

And once a ‘code of conduct’ has been put in place, without any real public debate about it, can we be sure it isn’t the thin edge of the wedge?

The BCI, let it be said at once, is a fine body of men and women. Some of them, it transpires when I look them up, are friends of mine (at least I like to think they are). They were set up under the law of the land, and they describe their own functions in relation to broadcasting as “generally … licensing, monitoring and developmental work”. Originally they were established to promote the development of commercial radio and television in an orderly way and, as time went on, they acquired more functions.

One of them is set out in Section 19 of the Broadcasting Act 2001.

It says: “The commission shall, upon being directed by the minister to do so and in accordance with the provisions of this section, prepare … a code specifying standards to be complied with, and rules and practices to be observed, in respect of the taste and decency of programme material, the subject of a broadcasting service or sound broadcasting service, and, in particular, in respect of the portrayal of violence and sexual conduct in such material …”

So they wouldn’t be going through the process of setting up a code of conduct if they hadn’t been instructed to by the relevant minister.

We live in a era when Freedom of Information has been dismantled, when the Dáil has been effectively neutered, when ministers have appeared to use the media to conduct vendettas against individuals, when advertising aimed at promoting public awareness about political (with a small p) issues has been effectively outlawed.

Now a new form of censorship is in the course of preparation, and it’s being done on political direction? Is that healthy? I said before this was happening without public debate.

No doubt I’ll be told there is a form of public consultation going on, but it’s not the same thing. You can easily download the “consultation form” from the BCI’s website and have a look.

Nowhere does it ask you to say whether you support the idea of this new form of externally-imposed censorship or not. Instead it asks for your views on a range of rules and principles the commission has already developed, according to themselves, from the consultative process they have already engaged in.

HERE are a few of the rules and principles, taken at random from the BCI’s document:

Programme material must not offend against commonly held standards of what is acceptable in contemporary Irish society.

Broadcasters must take all reasonable measures to ensure that viewers and listeners to programme material on their channel/service are protected from undue offence and harm.

Programme material will be assessed in whole and in context against the principles and rules contained in the code. The principles are indivisible, that is all programme material must conform to all principles.

As a general rule, broadcasters must have due regard to the appropriateness and/or justification for the inclusion of portrayals of sexual conduct in programming.

As a general rule, broadcasters must have due regard to the appropriateness and/or justification for the inclusion of coarse language in programming.

Broadcasters must avoid the inclusion of programme content which could encourage people to imitate acts which they see on screen which are dangerous or prejudicial to their health or safety and/or the environment.

There are more, of course. But think for a moment about some of these terms. Who is going to define and monitor things like “commonly held standards”, or “undue offence”? Who is going to be the arbiter of “coarse language”?

Are we going to get a whole new category of complaints that will result in material being banned without recourse to appeal or transparency? If someone does something they’ve seen on a soap, how will the broadcaster be punished? Whenever you raise doubts about censorship, someone is going to say that you’re in favour of “anything goes”, or that you support pornography on the television.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I hate television that is exploitative or demeaning of people, and I hate television that fails to respect people. A lot of what nowadays is called reality TV falls into that category for me.

But I don’t want to be told by faceless people what I should or shouldn’t watch, just as I don’t feel I have the right to tell others what’s good or bad for them. I’m all in favour of decent standards in broadcasting, but decent standards often includes uncomfortable or unpalatable truth.

James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, the late and wonderful John McGahern — these are just some of the people who fell foul in their day of “commonly held standards”, who were accused of giving “undue offence”.

When we start down this road, who’s guiding us? And where does the road go? Are we entitled to ask?