A privately-owned Afghan TV station was fined $1,000 in late January after broadcasting Bollywood films deemed offending and non-Islamic by the country’s Information and Culture Ministry. “This decision contradicts the current media rules and policies,” an administrator at the channel, Hajj Mohammad Rawish, was quoted by IRIN as saying. He added that representatives from the station were conspicuously absent when the decision was taken.
Although many restrictions have been lifted from Afghan media since the fall of the Taliban regime—including a new constitution calling for freedom of expression—a revised media law, signed by President Hamid Karzai in 2004, allows for the banning of content that is considered insulting to Islam. Last October, the editor of women’s rights magazine was sentenced to two years in jail after reprinting articles criticizing violent Islamic punishments such as stoning and corporal punishment.
Nonetheless, the Afghan media has come a long way since the Taliban’s tight grip restricted the media industry to only a few newspapers, one radio station and the imposition of an outright ban on television. Today there are some 300 publications, 40 radio stations and five TV stations operating in the country.