Broadcasting and Citizens

CZECH REPUBLIC

By Anja Herzog

1. TV VIEWERS PARTICIPATION IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC

After the collapse of the communist system, the Czech broadcasting system developed, like many others, into a dual system with public and private broadcasters. The national radio and TV station, ?TV, is now a public operator that provides two TV channels with a market share of 21.2 % and 8.7 %. Since 1994 it is complemented by the commercial broadcaster TV Nova, which is today the channel with the highest market share: 44.3 %. The second commercial TV station, Prima TV, has a market share of 18.4 %.1

As the research for this report showed, there are two general problems that characterise the Czech broadcasting system: 1) there still is a strong political influence on the broadcasters, 2) an overall lack of money is a prevalent characteristic of the Czech broadcasting system, which might explain why viewer participation is currently not the most important issue.

In the Czech broadcasting system the official possibility to complain is through the Council for Radio and TV Broadcasting, the responsible regulatory authority. On the website of the public broadcaster Czech Television, provides a forum for feedback and discussion about the TV programmes is provided, which is used frequently. In general, the system lacks a feed back loop though, which could incorporate the results of the audience research that is regularly carried out in both qualitative and quantitative studies by the public broadcasters. For an overview on the relevant institutions see the table at the end of this chapter.

1.1 Government and official bodies

In the organisation of the Czech broadcasting system, the Czech parliament plays an important role. First of all, it elects the broadcasting council CBC (Council for Radio and TV Broadcasting of the Czech Republic) – which is responsible for the regulatory authority of both public and private broadcasters. Moreover, the controlling body for the public broadcaster ?TV, the Czech Television Council (which consists of 15 members, with one-third of the members being replaced every two years) is also nominated by parliament and like the CBC reflects political interests of the parties of the parliament.2 This controlling body is responsible for the approval of the budget and in addition deals with the appointment of the general director of TV. With respect to accountability, the councils consider themselves as independent but have not reached many conclusions or decisions yet. Furthermore, they do not have much regulatory power. In fact, the councils are directly accountable to Parliament.

1.2 Self-regulation

According to the law, the public service broadcaster adopted a code of principles for public service broadcasting on Czech Television3 that is binding for all persons working within the company. The code defines the basic functions of Czech Television based on the programme for public broadcasting, adopted by the Council of Europe.

53 Czech Republic

1.3 Other organisations

Until now there are no viewers’ organisations or associations. The only activities of citizens, concerning TV content, have been petitions on violence and pornography on TV (the last in early spring 2004) that had several thousands of subscribers, but they were too general to cause any real changes. There are several Czech consumer organisations4 on regional level, providing information and help on matters of consumers rights and protection. On the website of the Association of Consumer Organisations a consultation form is available as well as an answers archive.

2. TV VIEWERS’ RIGHTS : THE REGULATORY FRAMEWORK

2.1 Sector (TV) specific regulation

The Media Control Act (1991) established the new regulations for the broadcasting system after the split up of the Czech and Slovak Republics. This act reorganised the previously combined broadcasting system and built the legal foundation for the formation of separate national broadcasters for both Republics.

Another decisive part of the Czech broadcasting system is the Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting, which was established by the Broadcasting Act5 on the 17th of May 2001 (No. 231/2001 Coll.) as a regulatory authority. Its role is to execute government administration in the area of radio and television broadcasting and retransmission.

The public broadcaster Czech Television was established as a legal entity on January 1st, 1992 by Act No. 483/1991 coll. on Czech Television. The amendment of the Czech Television Act in 2001 set up new rules for the election of the Council of CTV and provides for adoption of statutes as well as the Czech Television Code to lay down principles of public service provision.6 The Czech Television Council pursues its tasks in accordance with the Czech Television Act.

The Czech Television Code starts of with the right of the viewers as citizens and discusses in Article 1.3. the following: “In the fulfilment of its public service obligation stipulated by law and the Code, Czech Television shall ensure the satisfaction of the needs of the citizens-viewers. In order to achieve the aforementioned aim, it shall regularly and systematically collect and analyse data on the needs and wishes of individual viewer groups, as well as on their opinion and evaluation of the programmes broadcast. Each programming decision must take into account the results of such representative surveys, while using a fundamentally different approach to the input and evaluation of available data than that used by commercial operators of television broadcasting, especially in the emphasis placed on qualitative indicators. Programmes that do not take into account confirmed needs of the audience groups at which they are targeted obviously cannot meet the criteria of public service, since they have little effect on their audience. This rule, however, should not stand in the way of creative experiments aimed at testing the ground or stimulating interest in a particular genre or in a specific manner of treatment of a programme.“

2.2 Regulatory practices for positive and negative content regulation

Part 5 of the Broadcasting Act provides regulations about the “Rights and Duties in Programme Broadcasting”. Article 31 states that the broadcasters shall provide objective and balanced information and moreover, commentaries shall be separated from information. Article 32 describes the basic duties of broadcasters: “to ensure that programme units do not promote war or show brutal or otherwise inhumane behaviour, […] that the programme units do not arouse hatred for reasons relating to race, gender, religion, nationality or membership of a certain group of the population” as well as the protection of minors e.g. by pictorial symbols warning of the

54 Broadcasting and Citizens

unsuitability of the programme for minors and division of advertisement and programme. Article 33 defines the obligations of the broadcaster with respect to the broadcasting of events of major importance for society. Article 35 regulates the right of reply. Articles 42-47 implements the provisions of the “Television without Frontiers” Directive concerning promotion of European productions. Articles 48-53 provide regulations concerning advertising, teleshopping and sponsorship of programme units. Part 6 of the Broadcasting Act regulates the securing of the plurality of information in broadcasting. According to Czech Television, it “has been required by the amended Act on Radio and Television Broadcasting to make 25 % of its broadcasts accessible to the hard of hearing; in January 2001 a new amendment to the Act changed the percentage to 70 %.” In the annual report of 2002, the following percentages of the program where specifically aimed at the hearing impaired. 13,967 programmes, i. e. 49.0 % of all broadcast programmes of which: - closed captioning 12,997, i. e. 45.6 % - on-screen captioning (subtitles) 537, i. e. 1.9 % - no words 49, i. e. 0.2 % - sign language 385, i. e. 1.3 %.

2.3 Instruments established by law

The controlling bodies for the Czech broadcasting system is the CBC. The Council’s nine members are appointed by the Czech Parliament. According to the website of the CBC7, its communication with the public is “intensive and effective”. This communication takes place through press releases, issued immediately after any negotiations; through its web pages, the media, press conferences (not only in Prague, but also during the sessions on travel in the regions) and through publications of the individual members of the Council. “The Council also continuously evaluated (at the suggestion of the public as well) the practice of public appearances of the individual members of the Council, and set a detailed definition of the difference between a common standpoint of the Council and an individual opinion of a member, so that such standpoints would not be confused. This does not affect the constitutional right of an individual to express his/her own opinion” (see 3.1).

3. VIEWERS’ ORGANISATIONS SOCIAL IMPACT

Case Study: Council for Radio and TV Broadcasting (CBC)

The Council for Broadcasting is the broadcasting authority of the Czech Republic, elected by parliament and with the task to licence and supervise radio and TV broadcasting. One critical point is that the parliament pays big attention to the perfectly executed balance of party representatives in the Council, according to the balances in parliament which causes frequent changes in the membership of the Council. Moreover, this system clearly displays the influence of party interests on the work of the Council. In its annual report for 2003 the Council starts its introduction as follows: “Almost all the members of the Council for Radio and Television Broadcasting were changed during 2003. The former Council was removed on April 4th by the Prime Minister of the Government on the basis of a proposal of the Chamber of Deputies and the activities of the Council were thus interrupted for several weeks. In the new composition, the Council commenced its activities on May 27, where only a single member of the Council had any experience with activities of the regulatory body in the previous period.”8

The Council supervises the compliance of the TV (and radio) programmes with the law, this means it does monitoring and deals with complaints of the viewers. The complaints are often held very general (mostly received from notorious complainants so that they’re not necessarily representative). According to Petr Kolar, they should better be very concrete and focused on single programmes, because this would make it easier to find the article or

55 Czech Republic

paragraph in the law that was violated. In the case of violations of the law by a broadcaster the Council imposes fines. The decisions can be appealed to by the broadcasters, which is done very often. Another purpose of monitoring the TV programmes, apart from the protection of minors, is the supervision of news and information programmes for objectiveness and balance.

An additional problem is that the law often is not concise enough and that the definitions provided are too weak. For example, there was a complaint about a children’s programme of the biggest private broadcaster TV Nova and the Council imposed a penalty of 1,000,000 Kronen. But the channel took the decision to court and argued that there was no definition of children’s programmes in the media law (from 2001) and TV Nova was granted a full discharge by the court. In general, the legislation should be improved as the EU regulation is not implemented until now and the digitalisation needs special regulations. Yet, the new media law has already been expected for some time but so far the parliament has not succeeded in implementing a new law. One reason for this might be the frequent changes of people and constellations in the parliament and the fact that the parliamentarians do not seem to understand the importance and the consequences of digitalisation.

Important issues concerning viewers interests are the protection of minors including advertisement rules for children’s programmes, programmes including violence and pornography as well as balanced information and impartiality. The latter also suffers froma very weak regulation and a lack of concrete legislation.

Petr Kolar thinks that in general the knowledge about viewers’ rights is not very high among citizens, which might be due to the general habit of being content with the governing parties and not engaging very much in civil society questions. Nevertheless, the Council prepares information on its website, in the press and has got special days for visits of the citizens.

Mr. Kolar sees the best way of regulation in self-regulation. The Council invited representatives of the radio and TV channels for a discussion on an ethics code (which some of them already have) and the media representatives promised to work on a common code of ethics with the commitment of every broadcaster to follow it. The Council works together with the supervisory bodies of the broadcasters. Sometimes complaints are filed from the CBC to the Council. There is an influence of the bodies on the management of the broadcasters, but Mr. Kolar could not state how far this influence goes.

4. BEST AND INNOVATIVE PRACTICES

Until now, a best practice example of viewer participation cannot be observed in the current Czech broadcasting system – the CBC as the regulatory authority does not seem to be very influential, an independent accountability system does not exist and viewers organisations did not develop so far. Maybe a connecting factor can be seen in the consumer organisations that might be interested to engage in questions on viewers rights as well.

NOTES

1 Adults 15+, all day (6:00-6:00). See IP International (2004): Television 2003, International Key Facts, p. 316. 2 Information by Petr Kolar. See as well Šmid, Milan (2004): Medien in der Tschechischen Republik. In: Hans- Bredow-Institut (ed.): Internationales Handbuch Medien 2004/2005, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 661-670; and Petr Pavlik & Peter Shields (1999): Toward an Explanation of Television Broadcast Restructuring in the Czech Republic. In: European Journal of Communication, Vol. 14 (4): pp.487-524. 3 Czech Television Code: http://www.czech-tv.cz/english/pdf/code.pdf 4 http://www.consumers.cz

56 Broadcasting and Citizens

5 Broadcasting Act (2001) http://www.rrtv.cz/zakony_en/broadcasting_act2001.html 6 Both the statute and the Czech Television Code can be found on the website of Czech Television under http://www.czech-tv.cz/english/pdf/statute.pdf and http://www.czech-tv.cz/english/pdf/code.pdf. 7 Czech Television, Television Code, see: http://www.czech-tv.cz/english/pdf/code.pdf 8 Czech Television, Annual Report, 2003. see: http://www.czech-tv.cz/ct/publikace/pdf/CT_2003-AN.pdf 9 http://www.rrtv.cz 10 CBC, Annual Report 2002, Chapter 11 'Report on the activity of the council and its bodies' see: http://www.rrtv.cz/zprava_en/index.html 11 http://www.rrtv.cz/files/zprava_en/report2003.rtf

57 CZECH REPUBLIC - Overview of institutions dealing with viewers' interests