Another sanction for Tilos Radio

The new audio visual regulation obliges community radios to regularly provide full data about their broadcasts. The regulation was introduced despite the Hungarian Constitutional Court’s earlier opinion that it would place unreasonable burden on broadcasters and threaten the freedom of the press, and despite the Court abolishing the article on data provision in the current Hungarian media law.

In fact, the regular provision of detailed information on radio programs causes difficulties even to national and commercial media with ample administrative resources. The same expectation places extreme burden on community radios.

Similarly to all member states of the European Union, radio stations in Hungary are obliged to archive their programs for a certain period of time. According to the well-established European practice these archives provide adequate information to authorities, making regular data provision unnecessary.

Another limitation for broadcasters is the domestic music quota, a full set of rules about the weekend news service. and a percentage of weekend program’s public life content. Not having respected the law provisions, Radio Tilos in Budapest has been sanctioned.

In many European countries, there are no domestic music quota (ex: Sweden, Germany..). In other countries, some particular law provisions have been put in place. French speaking Belgium has two music quota rules :

– 30% of song music must be in French (almost similar rules exist in France)

– 4.5% of all music played must be from Belgium

This is binding for the private sector radios, community or commercial. Public service radios have other specific rules. Always in Belgium, as for community radios, the law says that “most of their programming” must be public service (information, educational/emancipatory, citizen participation of cultural development). In practice, the regulator has translated “most of their programming” into a more convenient “14 hours a week”, i.e. an average of 2 hours a day.