853 sites blocked in Turkey.

Turkey lifts ban on world's largest blog service

Tue, Oct 28 09:25 PM

Ankara, Oct 28 (DPA) Turkish Internet users regained access to millions of blogs Tuesday after a court ordered a temporary reversal of a ban on a blog hosting website imposed Friday.

The move reopens access to Blogger, a blog hosting service owned by Google. The service was banned by a court after a Turkish station complained that some 60 blogs were illegally showing videos of Turkish football matches.

Attempts to visit the site diverted users to a notice in English and Turkish explaining that access had been suspended.

Broadcaster NTV Tuesday reported that the Diyarbakir court had ordered the ban to be lifted and called for 'missing evidence'. The court could re-implement the ban once the missing evidence is provided, according to the broadcaster's website.

Turkish internet users are used to court-ordered bans of a large range of websites. The video-sharing site Youtube has been banned for hosting a video insulting the founder of the Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Adnan Oktar, an Islamic creationist has also been successful in getting a variety of sites banned by court decisions, including blog hoster Wordpress and the personal website of renowned biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins.

According to the government's Telecommunications Board, as of Aug 18, 2008, 853 sites were blocked in Turkey. 

 source 

Self-regulation by media is best

Editorial, The Asian Age, October 7, 2008 

News and current affairs broadcasting on television can hardly said to have covered itself with glory, although it has been some two decades since private channels made their entry. While production values have been less than ordinary in most cases, it is the content purveyed which often fails to clear the mark of professionalism. Sensational, insignificant and, at times, uncorroborated datum is known to be paraded as news or information. Regrettably, there are occasions when it is hard to tell the difference between some established news channels and those that flaunt their yellow journalism. This was, for instance, the case with the reporting on the Aarushi murder. Both shocked the country — the brutal and senseless killing of a 14-year-old girl and the breathless news reports on television with an eye for little more than lasciviousness. Sensing an opportunity, the government hinted at measures to restrict content. Fortunately, it didn’t go that far. In a democracy, it will be hard to stomach any intervention by government in the matter of regulation of media content. Now the News Broadcasters Association — which represents 30 channels run by 14 broadcasters — has on its own come forward to create a News Broadcasting Standards (Disputes Redressal) Authority for the purposes of self-regulation.

Ungainly as the name sounds, this is a welcome step. It speaks of a sense of responsibility to the viewers on the part of the broadcasters. It is commonly thought that television channels show a propensity to be sensationalist in a competition for eyeballs. With ad-spends shooting up since the liberalisation of the economy and globalisation, leading media players — not just in television — have courted the dramatic, the lurid, and the loud with a view to grabbing readers and viewers. But this appears to be a jaded trick. There are signs of the audience being put off. Many who were in the forefront of the trend now give the impression of mixing the sensible old norms of good journalism with only a dash of the sensational. The establishing of the NBSA last Thursday appears to be a step in the same broad direction. TV broadcasters just need to remember that it might be best for them to tone down a shade in order to remain credible. Given the visual nature of their medium, the sensational often appears to be a purposeful distortion to attract attention. source link