The terrible E! Entertainment (DStv 124) remains the blatantly most, most idiotically, schizophrenically non-sensical censored TV channel seen in South Africa.
E! News on Friday night on E! Entertainment in South Africa on DStv had more than a dozen blatant blackouts - blurred images, utter silence on the soundtrack multiple times, and a lot of deliberately censored content within a news show.
For a general entertainment TV channel purportedly bring viewers entertainment news, so much on E! Entertainment is constantly blacked-out, blurred, beeped, fuzzed-out and blatantly censored that besides being highly distracting and making for extremely uncomfortable viewing, the channel - especially its daily supposedly news programme, E! News, is a sad joke.
A crazy yet typical example is for instance this evening in E! News, when the episode even blurred the Facebook logo during the regular ''Talk Meter" segment during which viewers are encouraged to share their opinions and views on movies. The top most discussed movies are then listed and discussed by the anchors.
On the one hand E! Entertainment and E! News wants to encourage viewer interaction and build buzz on social networks. On the other hand Universal Networks International which pipes E! Entertainment to South Africa on MultiChoice's DStv platform through London, is so over-zealous in its extreme censorship, blurring and beeping that watching E! Entertainment and E! News has become an joyless, soulless exercise in watching a botched, lobotomised, over-censored TV channel.
Universal Networks International and E! Entertainment either caters for idiots as the target market for the channel, thinking that South African TV viewers are too unsophisticated to get that things like magazine issue dates, movie release dates, magazine covers, TV show starting dates, websites referenced as sources and even a Facebook logo is too confusing and that viewers won't be able to understand that it follows an Americancentric roll-out schedule.
Or otherwise the over-zealous channel censors doesn't get that the very stuff the channel is conveying and bringing to viewers - even though it is dates, and product logos and brands - is the very aim and purpose of the channel and see it as free advertising.
Imagine a car channel like IgnitionTV which is showcasing cars starts blurring, blocking and censoring every single car with a big black block because heaven forbid the viewer sees its a Bentley, a Merc, a Lamborghini or a Ferrari because that amounts to free marketing and advertising.
Imagine a food channel like the Food Network blurring out actual food products and specific ingredients. You can't see that the red blur for a specific recipe is actually Aubergine strawberries because strawberries aren't in season for South Africa right now, or its free publicity for the strawberry industry or Aubergine strawberries.
It's unforgivable and superbly ironic that a pop culture news channel has people like E! News anchors who would often talk for seconds with all that viewers hear is the sound of silence as their lips move. Totally muted out. Yet it's news. In a news show. But E! Entertainment and Universal Networks International totally censors its own product on a daily basis for a badly lobotomised version for South Africa.
Rather remove the E! Entertainment channel fully from DStv, or broadcast it fully without blurring and blocking and beeping. This in-between censorship like an intermittent Morse code radio signal during World War II is just too painful to endure.
