Germany

[DE] Improved Protection for Young People - The Regional Media Bodies Co-operate with the Voluntary Television Review Body

IRIS 1995-7:1/43

Andrea Schneider

Institute of European Media Law (EMR), Saarbrücken/Brussels

Over the last few months the regional media bodies have expressed their doubts over the efficiency of work carried out by the voluntary Television Review Body. This led to a preliminary meeting between the regional media bodies' Youth Protection And Programme Planning Working Party and representatives of the review body in Berlin on 7 June 1995.

As was reported in IRIS 1995-3:7 and IRIS 1995-5:9, the review body carries out pre-broadcast examinations on television programmes offered by private channels. To save time, not all the programmes proposed by a television channel are assessed. Only those programmes which could cause concern for youth protection are put before the review body by the youth protection officer of the member channel. In order to prevent certain programmes being slipped past, the review body also carefully watches programme listings and, if necessary, calls upon its independent board of trustees to intervene.

The first meeting between the two bodies served to discuss varying assessment criteria and bring evaluation standards into line with each other. For this purpose, seven representative films were assessed separately by both control bodies and discrepancies between results were studied.

It is proposed to continue collaboration between the two bodies and it is expected that this in turn will lead to improved youth protection in German television. Effective youth protection as it is set out in the State Radio Convention (based on the fundamental principle of organiser empowerment and limits on scheduling) can only be achieved by a meaningful combination of the two means of control (self-regulation by the voluntary review body and the supervisory control provided by the regional media bodies).