Another Case of Government Censorship

    Today’s discussion about the regulation of the media in Venezuela led me to wonder about the extent of government censorship in Turkey, where Kara Para Ask is produced. We had, of course, already spoken in class of  the censorship  of the “steamy” scenes in the telenovela, but without doing any research into Turkish media regulation, I thought that perhaps only sex and wounds were banned from being shown on television, due to some sort cultural conservatism and/or in an effort to make the show appropriate for a wider range of audiences. Those two things may play a role, but after I did some looking into the subject, I found that the regulation of the media in Turkey extends far beyond the banning of sex and gore, and is rather similar to (but less extreme than) the regulation in Venezuela. It turns out that the Human Rights Watch is also throwing up red flags regarding several aspects of the regulatory system in Turkey, especially in regard to journalists and independent news outlets. There is an interesting article which was published by the Human Rights Watch to be found on this subject here.The censorship most certainly extends to the content of their telenovelas, and I’m sure that the production team there has to be very careful, like the Venezuelans, in order to keep the show on the level and at least avoid incurring fines. While the situation there is not of the same magnitude as the one in Venezuela, the knowledge of both has made me re-evaluate how lucky I am to live in a country where the freedom of the press is protected.