I wonder whether the National Council for Radio and Television (ESR) really thought about its decision to summon the trappers Snik, Toquel and Rack over their lyrics, which the watchdog described as being “steeped in hate and images of violence”? The issue here is not just about the very reasonable concerns about censorship which have been expressed in this newspaper and on other platforms with regard to this decision. It is also about the violation of the artists’ privacy. To explain…
The National Council for Radio and Television stopped making its decisions public last summer. The state has a transparency website, Diavgeia, where anyone can find how many rolls of toilet paper the independent authority has purchased and from whom, and how much money it spends of staff transportation, but there is no way to find out anything about the key part of its job, meaning what decisions it has made about the radio and television programs it monitors.
The last decision we could find concerned a show broadcast in the morning prime-time slot in January 2019 by the Open Beyond channel, with a category 2 warning (parental guidance advised). The decision was reached in 2023 and published in June 2024, and it included the name of the show and of the person hosting it. The delay appears to stem from the fashionable discussion about privacy.
The members of ESR were apparently worried about whether and to what degree publishing their decisions is a violation of privacy – yes, we’re talking about the privacy of people who are on our television screens every day. All sorts of brilliant ideas were discussed when these concerns were brought up. One of them proposed not publishing the name of the TV show host nor of the show, but only of the station on which the violation was noted.
But what about the reasoning behind the decision? An explanation of who said what to prompt such disregard for the “privacy” of individuals who are on public view every day? I guess the authority will have to make the fines public without any explanation as to why.
For years, we have been writing that carrying out a criminal prosecution against someone is a public act and not a private affair of the person being prosecuted. “When an individual is arrested and charged, this is not a matter that is exclusively private to them. There is a public prosecution authority that is carrying it out. In other words, even if we weren’t meant to know who has been arrested, we must know who public authorities have arrested so that those authorities are, at the very least, subject to democratic oversight,” Kathimerini wrote in 2007.
Now, it seems, the absurdity of concealing public information is set to extend to the decisions of the National Council for Radio and Television.