Censorship

Censorship is the prevention from communication of ideas and information which are deemed offensive, dangerous or sensitive. The word derives from censor, the title of the Roman official who conducted the census and supervised public morality.

The forms of censorship most frequently associated with the term, are moral censorship, political censorship, and religious censorship.

Political censorship involves a government preventing information from reaching its citizens. Perhaps the most well-known contemporary example of this is China's censorship of the Google search engine, known as the "Golden Shield Project", which prevents Google from displaying search results of some human rights websites, websites promoting Tibetan independance, references to the 1989 Tianamen Square protests, and others. A famous example in fiction is George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the main character works as a civil servant in the department responsible for altering or destroying historical information which the government wishes to keep secret. The rationale behind political censorship is that the political party in power can protect itself from revolution if the public is kept uninformed.

Moral censorship suppresses information which is deemed to be offensive or damaging to public morality. It is commonly found in films broadcast on television, where scenes involving sex or violence are edited or excised, and instances of swearing are overdubbed with inoffensive words, background noise, or (less frequently) "bleeped out". Hip-hop and rock music albums are often released in two forms, one of which is a "clean" version which has had offensive material edited out.

Religious censorship combines features of political and moral censorship, as it can serve either to protect a ruling power, or to protect the public from coming into contact with heresies. One example of religious censorship is the Catholic Church's reaction to Galileo's heliocentric model of the solar system, which was thought at the time to be contrary to scripture.

More current examples include the destruction of conservative newspapers on college campuses. Censorship can also take the form of ostracizing students for expressing pro-life or other conservative views.

The First Amendment and censorship in the U. S.

In the United States, the First Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Broadly speaking, the First Amendment is designed to prevent the government from exercising censorship. However, the government sometimes censors political and religious speech anyway.

More specifically, the government should not exercise "prior restraint." That is, a citizen should not need advance permission from the government in order to publish something, unless it threatens national security. This does not mean that publication may not have consequences: a citizen can be sued for publishing libel, or incarcerated for disclosing military secrets, but the consequences typically occur after publication, not before.

Censorship is sometimes applied to prohibit obscenity that goes against common standards of public morality; however, these standards tend to fluctuate depending on time and place. Certain language and images that may have been censored in the past are typically common fare in the American media today. On the other hand, while nudity, for example, may be acceptable on mainstream French television, that is much less likely to be the case in conservative Muslim countries.

Quotes

• "All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. George Bernard Shaw

See also

• Fairness Doctrine