Council of Ethics left aside

Completely out of its competencies and in an obvious deliberate way, the NCRT has prejudged five programs by orienting the voters to choose one of them.

In this poll were included the programs Portokalli, Big Brother, Zone e Lire, Aldo Morning Show and 2XL.

NCRT member Gent Ibrahimi declared for Top Channel that the Council of Ethics at the NCRT is the one to decide if ethics have been violated or not, and there is no reason for creating a poll for the public opinion. If the “Council of Ethics thinks that ethics has been violated, it issues an official decision”, Ibrahimi declared.

Henri Cili also declared that such polls cannot be decided by any kind of majority, but by a group of specialized people.

“These are matters of expert evaluations, and the ethical issues are usually a competency of the highest courts. What NCRT has done is senseless, an inappropriate tactics that should be removed. There is a Commission of Ethics that judges if a program violates ethics or not. It is not a matter of percentages or popular voting, but it is a decision taken by experts, as the law provides”, Cili declared.

Publicist Dritan Hila thinks that the NCRT has prejudged Top Channel by including in this list two programs that have most of the views and represent the Albanian reality.

“Ethics, as part of esthetics, is still under evolution. People who live in cities might have a different opinion on something than someone who lives in rural areas. That’s why it is very difficult to have an accurate evaluation from these people, if there have been ethics violations by Top Channel or not. One of the two programs that have been criticized, Big Brother, which is a reality show, has the same format in many other civilized countries. Can this Ethics Council compete with the standards of Italy, Britain or the US? The other show, Portokalli, which is the most followed in Albania, is the only civil opposition against the government”, Hila declared.

The NCRT has an Ethics Council that has the competency and duty to judge if a TV has violated ethics through a program or not. If there are violations, the Council has the responsibility to inform the television for these violations.

It is worth emphasizing that the NCRT has a functioning Council of Ethics, composed of three members and that it is the only one tasked to assess ethics violations. The Council of Ethics has gathered only twice, only about a TV ad that was broadcasted a few months ago. There was no decision for one of the five other listed programs.

Hence, this NCRT poll seems a personal initiative with the only purpose to find something that could prove the declarations that the NCRT Chairman released last week, which damaged the image of Top Channel without having filed any official objection about it, and for which Mrs. Bushati has been criticized by the MPs, the media and the public opinion for lack of professionalism in the public reports.

“It is as reliable as polls on political newspapers such as ‘Zeri i Popullit’ or ‘Rilindja Demokratike’, when it is known what category of readers visit each page. On the NCRT case it seems unbelievable for me that this institution can take statistics that could penalize a TV like Top Channel”, Hila declared.

These actions show that NCRT does not act as an institution that is based on rules, but as a private company that damages the image of other programs and media outlets.

Top Channel