Hungarian media authority punishes radio for playing “It’s On” by Ice-T

In another thread , I have already mentioned the situation in Hungary. In a nutshell, if you don’t feel like reading that, the new media related law in Hungary consists of the following ridiculous regulations effective 1st January:

- News about crimes can’t take up more than 20% of the total amount of news in any news program in any kind of media. Which is just ludicrous. What’s next? Ministry of Happiness?

- Anything in any media can be reported by anyone on the grounds that it violated some hazy rule (the section which explains what can be regarded as a violation is deliberately ambiguous). Nationwide television and radio stations can be punished up to 200 million Hungarian Forints ($1 million ballpark) - any random person who owns a blog, writes down their opinion and gets reported by some moron can be punished up to 50 million Hungarian Forints (approx. $200.000)!

So today… today something so ludicrously insane happened I could’ve never thought about anything remotely this stupid. There is a radion in Hungary, which apparently played “It’s On” by Ice-T on 2nd September 2010. The newly founded Media Authority sent a warning to the radio that this song contains “offensive language” which can hurt the mental development of young (under 16) listeners.

What.

Their document cites some statistics about how many language exams people have passed in 2010 (like you know if it was relevant in any way…), so they argued that the majority of under 16 listeners can understand the lyrics of the song and this will turn them into cop-killer raging lunatics.

No, seriously.

And the funniest thing is yet to come: at the end of their document, the Authority gives the Hungarian “translation” of the lyrics, which is so ridiculously wrong half the time, that I seriously toyed with the idea that this is some elaborate hoax, possibly by the radio to raise awareness about the threats of the new media law. But no luck, this was meant to be taken seriously! I don’t think that this lyrics translation is that hard to do, and the translation was seriously wrong at the slang-free parts too.

The radio answered this of course with another document in which they argued that if we take all the people in Hungary, the ratio of the people who possess knowledge of the English language is so small, that it’s not really a sane thing to assume that listeners under 16 will understand anything.

They put some listener statistics on top of that to show that their audience only consists of 4% under 16 listeners, so in conclusion there could only be 1 or 2 under 16 listener who knew enough English to understand the lyrics of the song. Which is not significant at all of course.

But this is still not the saddest part. The editors at the radio had to explain to the veery authority, that tried to punish them that they can’t do that according to the constitution.

The authority stated: “The healthy mental and moral development of youth has to be more important than any other rights granted by the constitution.”

The radio answered: You can’t suppress the right for life, not even if the mental development of the youth would actually be in danger. Not ever.

Summary: See? We have a Media Authority who will switch to fifth gear in 2011, but they are so stupid, they don’t even know what’s in the constitution of this very country they operate in. Besides, the new media law will allow them to deal punishments left and right for things that make even less sense than this.

This is just ridiculous. I wonder what Ice-T would say about this.

What more can I say? From January 1st, it’s on - the new media law will be effective, and aside from protesting, we can do nothing about it. So it seems that Hungary has fallen back 20 years, right into the times between 1945 and 1989, when the USSR ruled the country and it was forbidden to watch movies from the west, listen to songs from the west, and criticize the government and/or its actions. In 2010.

Fuck.