TV2 – Hungarian TV channel fined to suspend broadcast for half day today

Budapest, January 2 (MTI) – Commercial channel TV2 will be forced to go blank for half a day from Thursday noon because it violated media regulations protecting minors back in 2009.

ORTT, Hungary’s media authority at the time, decided to impose the sanction in July 2009 because a chat show entitled Joshi Bharat had been shown by TV2 with the incorrect on-screen rating symbol and at a time-slot that went against the 1996 law on radio and television broadcasts.

In line with the ruling, the chat show should have been broadcast with a 16 rating for including indirect references to violence, sexuality and conflict management by violent means. Programmes rated 16 must be broadcast with a yellow circle with the number 16 written inside and only after 9pm and before 5am. The ORTT established that the channel violated these regulations also by showing previews of the programme outside of this timeframe, in the afternoon.

TV2 appealed against the ruling several times but eventually the supreme court Kuria has also upheld the decision that forces the channel to suspend its broadcast for 720 minutes.

Source: http://hungarymatters.hu/