Mediawatch-uk
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Mediawatch-UK, rendered by the organisation as mediawatch-uk, and formerly known as the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (NVALA) is a special interest pressure group in the United Kingdom, which seeks to highlight what it sees as regulatory failure on harmful and offensive broadcast content, such as violence, "bad language", sex, homosexuality and blasphemy in the United Kingdom. The organisation was founded as the NVALA in 1965 by Mary Whitehouse (1910-2001). After she retired as President in 1994, John Beyer became Director, and the organisation changed its name in 2001.
Mediawatch-UK monitors broadcast output, publishes reports about programme content and responds to Government and other consultations on broadcasting policy, as well as arguing for parliamentary accountability for broadcasters and greater public involvement in broadcasting policy issues. Mediawatch-UK's supporters argue that it is an important independent organisation that helps maintain standards in the British broadcast media. The organisation is mainly concerned with 'taste' and 'decency' issues and ensuring that the Broadcasting codes and guidelines are complied with. It argues that it plays an important role in promoting media literacy and in initiating discussion and debate about standards. Its detractors, however, claim that Mediawatch-UK's aims are authoritarian and censorious rather than rational and democratic.
Along with around 400 others Mediawatch-UK responded to a Home Office consultation concerning extreme pornography in December 2005. In the Mediawatch-UK response[1] it was suggested that the possession of hard-core pornography, as currently classified R18 by the British Board of Film Classification and, therefore, legally sold in high street sex shops (R18 classification), should be included in the range of extreme pornography that is the subject of the Home Office consultation. It is proposed that possession of extreme material would become a criminal offence punishable by up to three years in prison. Mediawatch-UK are campaigning for the law on possession "to include a much wider range of pornographic imagery, such as R18 material". This would, for example, make it a criminal offence for a couple to privately film themselves having sex.
Mediawatch-UK also responded to a Home Office consultation on the regulation of R18 videos, on a Department of Culture Media and Sport consultation on the future of the BBC, on the Office of Communications' Broadcasting Code and its Draft Annual Plan for 2006/7, on a House of Lords consultation on Religious Offences and much more.
