‘Communication ethics’ and the new censorship

Why do our communications need to be regulated?

This simple question was conspicuously absent from the three years of tortured debate that separated the UK government’s announcement, in December 2000, that it would ‘create a new unified regulator…responsible for the communications sector’; and the official launch of this ‘unified regulator’, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), in December 2003 (1).

Ofcom was ostensibly intended to reduce the burden of regulation, in an already heavily regulated communications sector. But in assuming the responsibilities of the UK’s previous broadcasting, telecoms and internet regulators, and in assuming new responsibilities all of its own, Ofcom has succeeded neither in reducing, nor in justifying, this regulation (2). It has, however, provided a useful opportunity to examine communications regulation as a whole – to ask what drives regulation, what its consequences are, and what our attitude towards it should be.

As of its launch, Ofcom had 263 specific duties (the various regulators that it replaced only had 128 specific duties between them), but these boil down to a basic six:

1. Ensuring the optimal use of the electromagnetic spectrum;




2. Ensuring that a wide range of electronic communications services – including high speed data services – is available throughout the UK;




3. Ensuring a wide range of TV and radio services of high quality and wide appeal;




4. Maintaining plurality in the provision of broadcasting;




5. Applying adequate protection for audiences against offensive or harmful material;




6. Applying adequate protection for audiences against unfairness or the infringement of privacy (3).

The first of these duties is largely a matter of technical administration, and the second is largely a matter of developing telecommunications infrastructure. (There are interesting political dimensions to these two duties, but they do not concern us here (4).) The remaining four duties, however, make important assumptions. The third and fourth duties assume that the media requires standards to be imposed upon it by an official body, while the fifth and sixth duties assume that the public needs to be protected from the media’s excesses.

Central to all of these assumptions is a contemptuous view of the public’s ability to think, argue and act for itself. It is assumed by regulators that true and desirable opinion cannot win public acceptance, unless they intervene to guarantee that it is heard; that untrue and undesirable opinion threatens to win public acceptance, unless they intervene to guarantee that it is not heard; and that the public is incapable of refuting hurtful or misinformed media content without their help. Public debate, independent of any involvement by the regulator, is mistrusted – if it is recognised at all.

This contempt is illustrated by the fifth of Ofcom’s duties, ’applying adequate protection for audiences against offensive or harmful material’. In what sense are words, images and sounds ‘harmful’, beyond the fact that they happen to cause offence? And whether or not something offends is an entirely subjective question, which cannot legitimately be decided upon by the 13 members of Ofcom’s content board (5).

Anything that expresses strong opinions is bound to offend at least some people – which is hardly a reason for regulating it. This does not mean that all offensive content has value, but rather that all offensive content has to establish its value in the court of public opinion, for which Ofcom is not a legitimate representative, supplement or substitute. There are, of course, types of content associated with tangible harm, most notably child pornography. But in these instances, the activity depicted is already criminal, and not sufficient justification for new forms of content regulation (6).

Discussing Ofcom’s ‘duty to promote media literacy’, Tessa Jowell, the UK secretary of state for culture, media and sport, recently argued that ‘we need to make sure people are equipped to protect themselves and their families from material which they would find harmful or distasteful’ (7). But the fact that just about every communications device has an ‘off’ switch means that people are, in fact, ‘equipped to protect themselves’. Furthermore, it is the job of editors to be responsible for the content that they publish, not the job of Ofcom to take on the editor’s role.

Far from deregulating the communications sector, Ofcom is fast becoming a one-stop shop for politicians and lobby groups who want to use it to impose their particular agendas upon the media. Making requests to Ofcom is a fast-track alternative to legislation, and has the advantage of seeming less heavy-handed than the law – even though the only real difference is that new laws at least have to be debated in Parliament before they can be introduced and enforced.

When Tessa Jowell recently asked Ofcom to regulate the advertising of food to children, the authoritarian message underlying her ‘light-touch’ regulatory approach was clear in her words: ‘I hope it will reflect the willingness of the food manufacturers to promote healthy eating’. Similarly, the government’s new Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy calls upon Ofcom to ‘oversee a fundamental review of the code rules on alcohol advertising and their enforcement’, which is Ofcomspeak for ‘do more to restrict alcohol advertising’. And Charles Clarke, secretary of state for education and skills, has asked Ofcom to impose stricter regulation upon the depiction of violence on TV, on the dubious grounds that ‘violence on television encourages people to grow up thinking that violence is an acceptable way of operating’ (8).

• Communications regulation: what’s new?

While Ofcom is a relatively new institution, communications regulation is nothing new, although it has been changing for some time. The media has always been subject to various forms of censorship and manipulation, as the authorities have sought to block public access to material that they consider to be beyond the pale – whether because it is politically seditious, sexually explicit, graphically violent, or otherwise outlandish. And an outspoken minority has long called for greater regulation and moral standards – for example the late Mary Whitehouse, who for 30 years headed the UK’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, and who eventually became a caricature of the green-ink brigade she represented (9).

Communications regulation has changed since Whitehouse’s heyday, most notably in that it is no longer promoted as necessary to preserve traditional values and interests. Instead, it is now argued that media practitioners should be subject to new, vaguely defined ethical burdens, quite distinct from earlier conceptions of professionalism and conscience; and that they should practice a corresponding form of etiquette, sometimes called ‘communication ethics’. It is also argued that the general public is somehow ill-equipped to comprehend the media, and therefore needs to be instructed in new methods of understanding – the ‘media literacy’ promoted by Ofcom.

The extent to which communications regulation has changed was made apparent to me in August 2003, when I spoke on a conference panel alongside Robert Beckett, coordinator of the Institute of Communication Ethics (10). Beckett told the audience that ‘communication ethics is an education approach that provides a highly developed pathway for teaching media literacy. With Ofcom behind it, the media industry will surely soon recognise the advantage gained through continuous education, both within the industry and outside it.’

Earlier forms of censorship at least presented a reasonably clear target against which one could make a case for free speech and unfettered public debate. There is something rather more insidious in the notion of bodies such as Ofcom thrusting ‘continuous education’ upon all of us for our own good.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Ofcom, compared to earlier media regulators, is its attitude toward media diversity. Diversity was not a preoccupation of earlier regulators, probably because it was self-evident that regulation reduces it – if material is suppressed that the regulator finds objectionable, then public access to material is diminished. Ofcom, however, defines its role and justifies its activities in terms of promoting media diversity. How does it get away with this? By combining, and confusing, the previously separate functions of a market regulator and a content regulator.

The media, like any other sector of the economy, has long been subject to a greater or lesser degree of state regulation, in order to control competition and curb monopolies. Today, however, criticism of the UK’s most successful media practitioners is such that there is a powerful demand for the government to step in and do something about it. Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee’s opinion of News Corporation owner Rupert Murdoch, ‘all he touches turns to dross – and gold in his own pocket’, sums up a wider sentiment; while Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere, Express Newspapers owner (and sometime pornographer) Richard Desmond, and the Telegraph Group’s (outgoing) owner Conrad Black, are all subject to similar opprobrium (11).

In this climate, Ofcom has not only been allowed to muddle market regulation and content regulation – it has been positively encouraged to do so. Of all of the debates over Ofcom’s remit that preceded its launch, perhaps the most heated and the most widely reported concerned the regulator’s authority to restrict concentration of media ownership. The demand was that Ofcom should have greater power to practice such restriction, and consequently Ofcom is now empowered to apply a new ‘plurality’ test to any major media merger, before permitting the merger to take place.

It is notable that the piece of UK legislation specifying Ofcom’s powers defines this plurality test not in terms of economics, but in terms of content. The Communications Act 2003 asserts ‘the need for…a sufficient plurality of views in newspapers’, and ‘the need for the availability throughout the United Kingdom of a wide range of broadcasting which…is both of high quality and calculated to appeal to a wide variety of tastes and interests’ (12). It would be naive to think that the workings of the free market are an automatic guarantee of media diversity, but the crude assumption now enshrined in British law – that the suppression of the former equates to the promotion of the latter – is equally problematic.

• Diversity: an end in itself, or a means to an end?

We cannot rely upon Ofcom to ensure that equal weight is given to various interests in media content, because official regulatory bodies are not above favouring the promotion of particular views, and having unreasonable prejudices against the interests and opinions of others. In our present political climate, which is characterised by an absence of firm beliefs and clear interests, the danger is less that the authorities will want to pursue their own agenda in regulating the media, and more that they will be afraid of anyone expressing a strong opinion or commanding a sizeable audience.

Underlying contemporary demands for the media to be made more pluralistic is, at heart, not an objection to economic monopolies, but a fear that the mass of people cannot be trusted to form its own opinions. Hence Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, who represent the US-based media consortium the Committee of Concerned Journalists, complain that in an unregulated media environment ‘spin replaces verification. Right becomes a matter of who has the greatest might – audience, wattage, rhetorical skill.’ (13) Yet the ‘greatest might’ has never stopped ideas from being debated, and audiences from drawing their own opinions. Rather, it is because critics of the media lack strong ideas of their own, with which to try and sway the public, that they turn to regulators such as Ofcom to suppress those whom they resent for being outspoken and commercially successful. The ‘diversity’ that these critics envision is not a genuinely healthy spectrum of opinion, but a uniformity of inoffensive opinion, a bland media environment appropriate to our bland political climate.

This vision is revealed by attitudes toward the internet and other new media. If the regulators’ interest in diversity were motivated by a genuine desire to bring us a greater choice and variety of media content, then they would be happy to leave the internet – where anyone with a computer and a connection is free to publish their views – unregulated. But the need for diversity and plurality to be imposed by the authorities is asserted just as strongly in relation to new media, where it would appear to be superfluous, as it is in relation to traditional media.

For instance, the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society, organised by the United Nations and the International Telecommunication Union in December 2003, declared ‘our common desire and commitment to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented information society, where everyone can create, access, utilise and share information and knowledge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting their sustainable development and improving their quality of life’. The summit also called for participants to ‘acknowledge the importance of ethics for the information society, which should foster justice, and the dignity and worth of the human person’ (14). How about butting out, and simply trusting the public to do as it will with new media?

Elsewhere, the Council of Europe’s ‘Draft Recommendation on the Right of Reply in the New Media Environment’ arrogantly asserts that ‘it is…in the interest of the public to receive information from different sources, thereby guaranteeing that they receive complete information’ (15). In truth, it is ‘in the interest of the public’ for people to be free to receive information from whatever variety of sources they choose – whether diverse or otherwise.

The key fallacy, in all of these official endorsements of diversity, is the idea that diversity of opinion is an end in itself. Politically speaking, diversity of opinion is actually just a means to the end of enabling a proper contest of opinions – that is, a contest where a particular opinion might actually win. Regulators are understandably apprehensive about this. After all, what if the ideas that end up winning popular support don’t happen to be ones that they approve of?

So we end up with the curious trade-off described by Andrew Calcutt in his book White Noise: An A-Z of the Contradictions in Cyberculture, where ‘being given a place on the spectrum of diversity is conditional on the placeholder’s willingness to abandon contestation as a modus vivendi and accept that difference is a virtue beyond question’ (16). This regulatory model purports to be liberal, on the grounds that it is more receptive to diverse ideas than old-fashioned censorship. But in fact, it is another, more cowardly, form of authoritarian control – cowardly, because the authorities are unwilling to stand up clearly for their particular worldview, and must instead be content to neuter anyone with the temerity to be opinionated or popular.

Far from celebrating new opportunities for diversity of content to flourish, today’s regulators characterise new media as a threat to the public. Ofcom’s chairman, Lord Currie of Marylebone, argues that ‘in the era of multiple choice reality TV, drive-by and embedded journalism and split-second editing, viewers expect to be informed but deserve to be protected’ (17). In his formulation, a public that has greater media choice and is more ‘informed’ brings with it a greater need to be ‘protected’, rather than a lesser need.

Media diversity is a good thing, only inasmuch as it provides an opportunity for the unrestricted circulation and clash of ideas. When Ofcom and others set out to promote a ‘plurality of views’, this is not what they have in mind.

• The media’s inflated role

The absence of any strong convictions or competing visions of society today, combined with the steady decline of public involvement in formal politics, has led to the media becoming increasingly central to political life. One could be forgiven for thinking that the ‘fourth estate’ of politics, as the press came to be described in the eighteenth century, has in the twenty-first century become elevated to the first estate of politics (18).

This elevation of the media’s political role has not occurred because today’s media is especially vigorous or radical, although doubtless many of those who work within it would like to believe that this is the case. Nor has this elevation occurred because the government has intentionally courted the media as part of its preoccupation with media relations, or ‘spin’ – a preoccupation that is more a symptom of the changing relationship between government and media, than its cause.

Rather, this elevation has occurred because those sources of political authority to which the media was traditionally subordinate have been eroded. It is in the absence of any institution that commands public support and has a coherent vision for society, that it falls to the media – unsuited as it is to the task – to take the lead. As Mick Hume puts it, ‘as other institutions lose their authority and grip, the mass media exerts wider influence almost as the last man standing, empowered by default rather than its own dynamism’ (19).

If the media has become disproportionately important to politics, then this goes some way toward explaining contemporary interest in the influence wielded by successful media owners. Rupert Murdoch, for instance, while undoubtedly an influential media figure, has been blown up into a villain of mythical proportions who controls the minds of the masses – a view that wildly exaggerates his power, while insulting the public’s intelligence into the bargain. And the media has in turn contributed to the exaggeration of its political role, for example by depicting the UK government’s former director of communications and strategy, or top ‘spin doctor’, Alastair Campbell, as a domineering Machiavel who pulls the strings of power. Campbell has responded angrily that ‘90 percent of what is commonly described as spin is actually put there by newspapers with an agenda’ (20)

It does not bode well for the media or for politics, when journalists are able to flatter themselves that they constitute either the de facto opposition to the government, or the democratic mechanism by which the government is held to account. Of course, it is important that the media be free to criticise the government, and investigate its activities. But this is not the same thing as exploiting popular cynicism about politics to mount facile attacks on politicians, which is all too often the principal activity of the media today (21).

The British authorities fear, with some justification, that the media now enjoys greater sway over the general public than they do. The hope seems to be that Ofcom will redress this situation, and act as a brake upon the media’s influence. Typical of the debate over media ownership prior to Ofcom’s launch was the comment made by Lord McNally of Blackpool that ‘in the 1930s, we were afraid that the fascists would take over the government and then control the press: in the twenty-first century, there may be a danger that the fascists will take control of the press and then control the government’ (22).

What is missing from both of the scenarios set out by Lord McNally is, of course, the public. The public is the constituency that the authorities are ultimately obliged to engage with, if they wish to make the case for their own vision of society, as against that of ‘the fascists’ or whomever else they disagree with. Trying to dampen down the media’s political influence by regulating it through Ofcom, rather than by appealing to the public with some decent ideas, can only serve to estrange the public still further from political life. And a situation in which the media beats politicians with cynicism, and politicians beat the media back with regulation, is a sorry excuse for politics.

Ofcom recognises the public only as a fragile entity, which needs to be shielded from extreme material and placed on a media literacy course. But if politics is to engage the public once again, then the public needs to be offered robust political debate, not spoken down to.

• A toothless media will benefit nobody

Ofcom will continue exercising novel and insidious forms of regulation, shaping a ‘diverse’ media landscape where confrontation and strong opinions are regarded with suspicion. Indicative of the regulator’s presumptuous attitude was its recent criticism of Rupert Murdoch’s US cable channel Fox News, after a Fox News commentator accused the BBC of ‘frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism’. Twenty-four easily offended viewers were apparently upset enough to lodge complaints, after the Fox piece said that the BBC was often heard ‘bragging about how much superior the Brits are delivering the news’, but had been ‘caught lying’ by the Hutton Report (23). That was excuse enough for Ofcom to treat the august institution of the BBC as if it were a little child, in need of protection from a few offensive words, on a TV broadcast that few British viewers could even have seen.

Ofcom will also continue to patronise us, by instructing us – through the framework of media literacy – to apply its values to the media that we consume. And media practitioners will themselves be encouraged by Ofcom and others effectively to censor themselves, to conform to new codes of conduct under headings such as ‘communication ethics’. Media practitioners should be especially wary of schools of journalistic practice that go under the heading of ‘ethics’ – a word that projects an air of reasonable, open-ended philosophical consideration, but today is all too often about handing over decisions to self-appointed groups of specialists.

Just as there are no specialists qualified to dictate ethical terms to the scientific and medical professions, which have been overrun with new ethical initiatives, so there are no specialists qualified to dictate ethical terms to the journalistic profession (24). Journalists may be honour-bound to adhere to certain principles – the most important of which are getting their facts straight, and telling the truth as they understand it. But this should be a matter for themselves and their editors, not for regulators working off an ethical checklist.

As the academic and journalist Ian Hargreaves puts it, ‘there simply is no lingua franca of journalistic ethics…. If journalism is, in its origin and purpose, concerned with the expression and testing of public opinion in all its diversity, we should not be surprised that it lacks a tightly disciplined rulebook.’ Or in the words of the academic Brian McNair, ‘apart from the identification of factual errors, the critique of journalistic content can be no more absolute than the critique of art’ (25). By seeking to formalise everything that it is independent and informal about the media, and bring it within the purview of the state, Ofcom and the proponents of communication ethics encourage media practitioners to harbour a kind of permanent, paralysing self-doubt.

This was illustrated at the launch of the publication Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics, held at London’s City University in November 2003 (26). Former Mirror editor Roy Greenslade, who now teaches journalism, recalled at the launch how he had learned his trade in an era of ‘practical journalism’, where ‘there was never a question about whether or not you were acting rightly’. He celebrated the fact that by contrast, ‘young people now are consumed by whether they’re doing the right thing or not’, and argued that a generation of journalists preoccupied with ethics is of greater service to the public than a generation of journalists who will stop at nothing to get a good story.

This is simply not true. The public is in fact best served when the media is fearlessly inquisitive, and willing to rock the boat. While such a media will always upset and inconvenience specific individuals, and work against specific interests, it will ultimately benefit the public as a whole. A fearless media provides greater opportunities – not guarantees, but opportunities – for the truth to be arrived at. A toothless media, on the other hand, can benefit nobody.

It was bad enough when the authorities restricted free speech in specific instances. Today, Ofcom is fostering a media environment that is hostile to the assertion of strong ideas in general, which is arguably worse. We need both free speech and strong ideas, if politics is to thrive and if society is to move forward. Most importantly, we need to trust the public with free speech and strong ideas. Nobody is more qualified than the public to handle these things.

Sandy Starr has consulted and written on internet regulation for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and for the European Commission research project RightsWatch. He is a contributor to Spreading the Word on the Internet: Sixteen Answers to Four Questions, Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, 2003 (download this book (.pdf 576 KB)); From Quill to Cursor: Freedom of the Media in the Digital Era, Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, 2003 (download this book (.pdf 399 KB)); and The Internet: Brave New World?, Hodder Murray, 2002 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).

(1) The new organisational framework (.pdf 135 KB), A New Future for Communications, Department of Trade and Industry and Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 12 December 2000, p77

(2) The Office of Communications amalgamated the UK’s five previous broadcasting, telecoms and internet regulators: the Independent Television Commission, the Radio Authority, the Office of Telecommunications, the Broadcasting Standards Commission and the Radiocommunications Agency

(3) Ofcom’s statutory duties, on the Office of Communications website. See Countdown to a new order, Maggie Brown, Guardian, 1 December 2003

(4) The politics of spectrum allocation are explored in The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, Lawrence Lessig, Vintage, 2001, p218-234 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)). The politics of communications access and infrastructure are explored in Phoney basis to panic, by Sandy Starr; The future in 3G, by James Woudhuysen; Phoney friends, by Jennie Bristow

(5) See The Ofcom content board: functions and role, on the Office of Communications website

(6) See Netting paedophiles, by Sandy Starr; Fetishising images, by Barbara Hewson; Defending the indefensible online, by Sandy Starr

(7) Jowell: media literacy ‘as important as maths or science’, Bernadette McNulty, Guardian, 21 January 2004. The Office of Communications has a ‘duty to promote media literacy’ under section 11 of the Communications Act 2003, Duty to promote media literacy

(8) Minister with a taste for rugby – and an appetite for battle, Jackie Ashley, Guardian, 1 December 2003; Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy For England (.pdf 406 KB), Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, 15 March 2004, p38; Clarke: TV violence creates bullies, Observer, 28 December 2003

(9) Mary Whitehouse founded the Clean Up TV Campaign in 1964, which became the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association the following year, and she remained its president until 1994. See the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association Collection, on the Archives Hub website

(10) The conference was entitled ‘After the Act: New Challenges for Communication Policy’. It took place at Harris Manchester College in Oxford on 7 August 2003, and was organised by the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at Oxford University. See the Institute of Communication Ethics website

(11) The threat to our TV from this corrupter of politicians, Polly Toynbee, Guardian, 30 April 2003. See the News Corporation, Daily Mail and General Trust, and Express websites, and the Telegraph Group press office section of the Telegraph website

(12) Communications Act 2003, part five, chapter two, section 375

(13) The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, Atlantic Books/Guardian Books, 2003, p136-137 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)). See the Committee of Concerned Journalists section of the Journalism.org website

(14) Declaration of principles: building the information society – a global challenge in the new millennium (.pdf 160 KB), World Summit on the Information Society, United Nations/International Telecommunication Union, 9 December 2003, principle 1, p1; principle 57, p8. See ICT wusses, by Nico Macdonald; Developing IT, by James Woudhuysen

(15) Draft Recommendation on the Right of Reply in the New Media Environment and a draft explanatory memorandum thereto (.pdf 188 KB), Council of Europe, 27 November 2003, p2. See The Wrongs of Right of Reply, Sandy Starr, Tech Central Station, 7 August 2003

(16) White Noise: An A-Z of the Contradictions in Cyberculture, Andrew Calcutt, Macmillan, p34 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA))

(17) Voice of the listener and viewer conference, David Currie, Office of Communications, 30 April 2003

(18) The first three ‘estates’ referred to the domains of government that corresponded to the three classes of the citizenry – Kings, Lords and Commons in the British Parliament; clergy, nobility and commoners in the States-General of pre-revolutionary France

(19) From Iraq to Europe, the media spins the spinners, by Mick Hume

(20) Campbell backs freedom of information, Michael White, Guardian, 12 May 2004. See After Alastair, by Brendan O’Neill; Dodgy dispute, by Brendan O’Neill

(21) See New Labour’s problem is disintegration, not immigration, by Mick Hume; After Hutton, by Mick Hume; Don’t cheer if Hutton brings down Blair, by Mick Hume; If there is no alternative to this, we’re all in reverse, by Mick Hume; It’s the authority crisis, stupid, by Mick Hume; People don’t believe Blair – or anybody else, by Mick Hume

(22) House of Lords debates, Tom McNally, Hansard, 8 July 2003, col 153-154

(23) Liar liar, John Gibson, Fox News, 29 January 2004; Standards cases – upheld, Programme Complaints Bulletin, Ofcom, 14 June 2004. See Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly CMG (.pdf 1.94 MB), Brian Hutton, 28 January 2004

(24) See, for example, Fishing for theories, by Stuart Derbyshire; Debating ‘designer babies’, by Ellie Lee; Four legs better?, by Tony Gilland; Bad behaviour, by Juliet Tizzard; Eroding expertise, by Bill Durodié; Life and death decisions, by Josie Appleton; Making babies, by Tessa Mayes; An overdose of medical ethics, by Michael Fitzpatrick; The sex selection question, by Piers Benn

(25) Journalism: Truth or Dare?, Ian Hargreaves, Oxford University Press, 2003, p232 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)); News and Journalism in the UK (4th edn), Brian McNair, Routledge, 2003, p52 (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA))

(26) The launch was held on 26 November 2003. See the Ethical Space website