Censorship: Encyclopedia - Censorship

Censorship

Censorship is the control of speech and other forms of human expression, often by government intervention. It is most commonly applied to acts which occur in public circumstances, and most formally involves suppression of ideas (by criminalizing or regulating expression). Discussion of censorship often further considers less formal means of controlling perceptions by excluding various ideas from mass communication. What is censored may range from specific words to entire concepts. The ostensible motive of censorship is to stabilize or improve the society over which the government has control.

Sanitization (removal) and whitewashing (from whitewash) are almost interchangeable terms that refer to a particular form of censorship via omission, which seeks to "clean up" the portrayal of particular issues and facts which are already known, but which may conflict with the official point of view. Some consider political correctness to be related, as a socially-imposed (rather than governmentally imposed) type of restriction, which, if taken to extremes may qualify as self-censorship.

Censorship - Censorship Types

In England, it started by introduction of copyright laws which gave the crown the permission to license publishing. Without government approval printing was not allowed. It is sometimes called prior restraint when a court or other governmental body prevents a person from speaking or publishing. This is sometimes viewed as worse than punishment after someone speaks as in libel suits.

Censorship can be explicit, as in laws passed to prevent select positions from being published or propagated (as in the People's Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, and Australia where certain Internet pages are not permitted entry), or it can be implicit, taking the form of intimidation by government, where people are afraid to express or support certain opinions for fear of losing their jobs, their position in society, their credibility, or even their lives. In this latter form it is similar to McCarthyism.

Censorship - State secrets and unwanted attention

Explicit wartime censorship is carried out with the intention of preventing the release of information that might be advantageous to an enemy. Typically it involves obfuscation of times or locations, or delaying the release of information (e.g. the objective of an operation) until it is of no possible use to enemy forces. Mention of weapons and equipment is another favourite area for censorship. The moral issues here are often seen as somewhat different when release of tactical information may present a greater risk of casualties among one's own forces and possibly loss of the overall conflict.

A well-known example of sanitization policies comes from the USSR under Stalin, where publicly used photographs were often altered to remove people whom Stalin had ordered executed. Though past photographs may have been remembered or kept, this deliberate and systematic alteration of history in the public mind is seen as one of the central themes of Stalinism and totalitarianism. Censorship is a form of sanitization. More recently, exclusion of news crews from locales where coffins of military decedents were in transit has been cited as a form of censorship.

Censorship - School textbooks

The content of school textbooks is often the issue of debate, as their target audience is young people, and the term "whitewashing" is the one commonly used to refer to selective removal of critical or damaging evidence or comment. The reporting of military atrocities in history is extremely controversial, as in the case of Nanjing Massacre, the Holocaust (or Holocaust denial), and the Winter Soldier Investigation, regarding the Vietnam War. Also, the theory of evolution has been censored by many since it contradicts the beliefs of their religion. In each society, the representation of its own flaws or misconduct is typically downplayed in favor of a nationalist or patriotic view. In the context of high-school level education, the presentation of facts and history greatly influences the interpretation of contemporary thought, opinion, and socialization. The legitimate argument for censoring the type of information disseminated is based on the inappropriateness of such material for certain younger age groups. The use of the "inappropriate" distinction is controversial, as well, as it can be used to enforce wider politically-motivated censorship.

Censorship - Terms

"Censorship" comes from the ancient Roman word "censor". In Rome, the censor had two duties, to count the citizens and to supervise their morals. The term "census" is also derived from this word.

An early published reference to the term "whitewash" dates back to 1762 in a Boston Evening Post article. In 1800 the word was used publicly in a political context, when a Philadelphia Aurora editorial said that "if you do not whitewash President Adams speedily, the Democrats, like swarms of flies, will bespatter him all over, and make you both as speckled as a dirty wall, and as black as the devil."

The term "sanitization" is a euphemism commonly used in the political context of propaganda to refer to the doctoring of information that might otherwise be perceived as incriminating, self-contradictory, controversial, or damaging. Censorship, as compared to acts or policies of sanitization, more often refers to a publicly set standard, not a privately set standard. However, censorship is often alleged when an essentially private entity, such as a corporation, regulates access to information in a communication forum that serves a significant share of the public. Official censorship might occur at any jurisdictional level within a state or nation that otherwise represents itself as opposed to formal censorship.

Censorship - Implementation

Censorship is regarded among a majority of academics in the Western world as a typical feature of dictatorships and other authoritarian political systems. Democratic nations are represented, especially among Western government, academic and media commentators, to have somewhat less institutionalized censorship, and instead are represented as promoting the importance of freedom of speech. The former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics maintained one of the largest official programs for state-imposed censorship imaginable. The main organ for official censorship in the Soviet Union was the Chief Agency for Protection of Military and State Secrets generally known as the Glavlit, its Russian acronym. The Glavlit also handled censorship matters arising from domestic writings of just about any kind—even beer and vodka labels. Glavlit censorship personnel were present in every large Soviet publishing house or newspaper. Glavlit employed some 70,000 censors to review information before it was disseminated by publishing houses, editorial offices, and broadcasting studios. No mass medium escaped Glavlit's control. All press agencies and radio and television stations had a Glavlit representative on their editorial staffs.

Some thinkers understand censorship to include other attempts to suppress points of view or the exploitation of negative propaganda, media manipulation, spin, disinformation or "free speech zones". These methods tend to work by disseminating preferred information, by relegating open discourse to marginal forums and by preventing other ideas from obtaining a receptive audience.

Suppression of access to the means of dissemination of ideas can function as a form of censorship. Such suppression has been alleged to arise from policies of governmental bodies such as the FCC in the United States of America, the CRTC in Canada, or of newspapers that refuse to run commentary the publisher disagrees with, or a lecture hall that refuses to rent itself out to a particular speaker, or an individual refusing to finance that lecture. Omission of select voices in the content of stories also serves to limit the spread of ideas and is often called censorship. Such omission can result, for example, from persistent failure or refusal to contact criminal defendants, among media that rely instead on official sources for explanations of crime. Censorship has been alleged to occur in such media policies as blurring the boundaries between hard news and news commentary, and in the appointment of biased commentators, such as a former government attorney, to serve as anchors of programs labeled as hard news but comprising primarily anti-criminal commentary.

The focusing of news stories to exclude questions that might be of interest to some audience segments, such as the avoidance of reporting cumulative casualty rates among citizens of a nation that is the target or site of a foreign war, is often represented as a form of censorship. Favorable representation in news or information services of preferred products or services, such as reporting on leisure travel and comparative values of various machines instead of on leisure activities such as arts, crafts or gardening has been represented as a means of censoring ideas about the later in favor of the former.

Censorship - Prevention and bypassing

Since the invention of the printing press, distribution of limited producton leaflets has often served as an alternative to bypass dominant information sources. With the advent of widespread distributed network communication, data havens and decentralized peer-to-peer file sharing systems such as Freenet have been used to overcome censorship. A recent phenomenon attempts a form of counter-censorship, speaking directly to members of society in a culture jamming effort. Individuals or non-conforming groups use mass communication techniques to attack implicit domination, offering trivial or deliberately irrelevant messages to blunt the impact of dominant mass communication.

Throughout history, mass protests have served as a method for resisting unwanted impositions, though modern technology often affords control of mass meetings to the groups who control sound amplification systems around which the meetings are organized. Modern sound-reinforcement technology has sometimes lead to a perhaps mistaken perception that all those in attendance at mass gatherings represent similar ideals on a broad spectrum, when in reality, individual members of the crowd might agree only in narrow measure with those whose voices are amplified. Mass reproduction through broadcast, print and network technology of the ideas amplified from a podium can effectively censor the voices of individual members of a crowd.

Interestingly, the censorship of scatological or otherwise course vernacular in the United States seems not always to extend to non-American pronunciations. Instead of shit, the Scots and Northern English variant shite may apparently be used, as may fook for fuck. (Note: this was witnessed on broadcast television in early 2004, before the FCC levied several highly publicized fines.) Popular animated comedy such as The Simpsons or South Park have on occasion bypassed prohibitions against broadcast of scatological vernacular speech and utterances related to bodily penetration by mimicking the intonation of such popular phrases while omitting the consonants that otherwise clarify the words. In the United States, publicly cited opposition to censorship often focuses on the ability of high-paid media figures to utter a few forbidden terms while a more detailed discourse about limits of free speech develops in professional associations or in marginalized networks such as Internet forums.

In recent times, censorship has taken the form of limiting access to public information in more useful formats, such as electronic information used by regulatory agencies, while the right to access and disseminate reports based on public information is limited to forms of information that can only be analyzed by scanning or reading paper documents. Fees for paper and other materials used to release public information that are disproportionate to the actual costs of paper copying also serve to regulate dissemination of information about government activities. In an age of distributed electronic networks, of advanced security algorithms that can facilitate supervised limited access to such networks and of low-cost photo-reproduction technology, limiting the availability of information that can be mass produced by imposing disproportionate fees as a condition to release of information is said by some to be a parallel to media taxes imposed but then outlawed on the American continent in the 17th Century.

Even apparently open network communication can be the target of allegations of censorship, because such networks rely on technology not evenly distributed among all population segments. Groups with the most time and resources to participate in networked communities may, perhaps unbeknownst even to most group members, use their superior access to supplant information as would be told by minorities or older communities with versions that are preferred by a dominant sector of those who own more technology.

Censorship - Censorship around the world

• Censorship in Australia
• Censorship in Egypt
• Censorship in France
• Censorship in Germany
• Censorship in Hong Kong
• Censorship in Iraq
• Censorship in Israel
• Censorship in Japan
• Censorship in Malaysia
• Censorship in India
• Censorship in the Republic of Ireland
• Censorship in Saudi Arabia
• Censorship in South Asia
• Censorship in the Soviet Union
• Censorship in Singapore
• Censorship in Taiwan
• Censorship in the Russian Empire
• Censorship in the United Kingdom
• Censorship in the United States
• Censorship in Tuva
• Internet censorship in mainland China
• Internet censorship in Saudi Arabia

Censorship - Censorship of Media

• Banned books
• Banned films
• Banned computer and video games
• Censorship of music
• Editing of anime in international distribution
• Video game controversy
• Corporate media

Censorship - Other types of censorship

• Advertising regulation
• Censorship by organized religion
• Censorship in cyberspace
• Censorship under communist regimes
• Censorship under fascist regimes
• Fundamentalist censorship
• Moral censorship
• Postal Censorship
• Corporate censorship

See also

• Whitewashing
• Al Menconi
• Autocensorship
• Bleep censor
• Book burning
• the Censored Eleven (banned Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons)
• Charles Schumer
• Censorware
• Cindy's Torment
• Death Whoop
• Entertainment Software Rating Board
• Fahrenheit 451
• Index Librorum Prohibitorum of The Roman Catholic Church
• International Freedom of Expression eXchange
• Jack Thompson
• Joe Lieberman
• John Stuart Mill
• Lady Chatterley's Lover
• Leland Yee
• Media controversy
• MPAA rating system
• Prior restraint
• Pro-censorship lobbying
• Production Code
• Project Censored
• SourceWatch
• Super Bowl XXXVIII controversy
• Thomas Bowdler
• Tunisia Monitoring Group
• TV Parental Guidelines
• V-chip

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Censorship", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki