Republic of Türkiye

[TR] Regulatory Body Attacks Erotic TV

IRIS 2005-7:1/31

Thorsten Ader

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

On 6 May 2005, the Turkish broadcasting regulator (RTÜK) announced that it planned to remove four channels showing erotic content from the list of channels transmitted by the satellite company Digitürk. The channels concerned - Adult Channel, Exotica TV, Playboy TV and Rouge TV - are all broadcast from abroad and have about 12,000 subscribers in Turkey. They will no longer be available in Turkey because the regulator claims they infringe "the moral values of the nation". Digitürk has already said it will appeal against the ban.

The RTÜK also issued warnings to eight private broadcasters for showing a perfume advertisement which had damaged the "sense of shame" of Turkish people. The regulator did not indicate which particular advertisement had caused offence.

The RTÜK had only recently caused uproar with its announcement that it wanted to set up a separate body to monitor reality shows. It had described these programmes as a product of "brutal capitalism".