The Ed Sullivan Show and the (Censored) - Essay Example

However, the censorship of the creating party should not be accomplished through any form of governmental interference. There are only a few exceptions within this argument, but for the most part censorship should not exist in a society that is based on the ideologies of freedom. High levels of information censorship exists in countries that do not base their ideologies on basic democratic freedoms. As an example, in many countries in the Middle East the news is censored in order to control what is reflected about the nations in question.

Israel censors the news that is released from occupied Palestine as a way to control information that comes out of this region (Bowne and Early 79). Censorship is a form of control that asserts the will of the governing party over that of the people. Information is power, and these types of governments want to retain that power within their own control. In this case, the act of censorship defines the roles of a nation through those who know and those who don’t know. However, it is not only through ideology, but through cultural understandings that censorship exists.

The one certain example of universally accepted censorship is concerned with pedophilia. In the United States it is illegal to own material that is considered pederasty. To be even more specific, it would be common sense to believe that the use of a boy by a man would be condemned in every part of the world. However, this is untrue. In Sambia, New Guinea, it is considered part of the rites of passage for young boys to receive the ’benefit’ and ’nurture’ of the oral intake of fluids from their elders (Browning 26).

Where in Western societies the exchange is considered feminizing, in Sambian religious and social ritual, this is considered a passage from the feminizing of the mother’s milk to the masculinity of the male fluids (Flood 540). While this type of exchange is considered foul and without any excuse, reason, or acceptance, the rites are considered a valuable part of the transition of boys to men. Where one society assigns value, another defines it as obscene, thus censoring it. This goes to prove that while the United States is a free society, the restrictions on the social interactions may seem to be base upon universal sensibilities of right and wrong, it is a Western cultural belief that this type of interaction is outside of accepted social practice.

Freedom, in this case, extends to the point where innocent victims are used, thus creating a system in which each individual is only as free as it affects only themselves. However, this is not always the case either. Individual actions are censored, such as drug use and prostitution, because it is believed that these acts lower the integrity of the moral and ethical status of a society. Therefore, even a free society will have censorship of information and actions if it believes that those freedoms will lead to the overall detriment of society.

In the United States there is a persistent state of censorship on entertainment. As an example, Ingles reveals that three performances on the Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s were censored with different outcomes. Bob Dylan was asked to change his performance and walked away, never to appear. The Rolling Stones were to sing their new single Let’s Spend the Night Together, but the insinuation made by the word Night was too suggestive and the word was changed to