Bahrain Arabic daily's Youtube channel banned

A local daily’s YouTube channel has been banned by the authorities for violating the Kingdom’s Journalism, Publications and Distribution Law, it was announced yesterday.

The Arabic daily reported yesterday that “Parliament and Information Affairs Ministry informed the paper through a telephone call that it’s not allowed to use its YouTube channel.”

Justifying the ministry’s decision, Parliament and Information Affairs Minister Isa bin Abdulrahman Al Hammadi stated during a press conference yesterday, “The ministry’s decision to shut down a broadcasting channel of one of the dailies comes to its commitment to enforcing the Printing and Publishing Law and complying with the licences granted to the media institutions to operate in Bahrain.”

Elaborating further during the conference which followed the weekly Cabinet meeting, Al Hammadi said that “any infringement of the licences requires the ministry's intervention to bring the situation back to normal and prevent any practice outside this framework.”

He said “the ministry values the media institutions; keenness and vision to develop their activities and work and shift from the written media to the audio-visual one.”

However, he clarified that “applications have been submitted to the ministry, but the issue was clear and the applications will be processed when the law allows it.”

“Work is going on to complete the comprehensive media draft law which will be submitted to the legislative authority soon,” adding that “media institutions will have a part in this law by contributing their opinions before the draft law is presented to the legislature.”

Al Hammadi added that “what happened was a routine procedure followed by any legal party enforcing the law and is committed to the granted licences.”

The minister commended the role of all media institutions in Bahrain despite all challenges facing them, including mainly a decrease in the advertising momentum which is their main source of revenues. He also lauded the major role of the media in shedding light on projects being carried out in Bahrain. 

The publication had developed its social networking sites lately, broadcasting what’s a television-like programmes on YouTube. Anyhow, despite justifying its stances through a written report, the channel stopped broadcasting any media contents following the ministry’s decision.