Censorship in the Media - Research Paper Example

?Censorship in the Media Most democratic countries have explicit laws which guarantee the freedom of the media. In the United s the guarantee ofpress freedom is found in the text of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America which was added in 1791. This text states that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or 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” (quoted in Lewis, 2002, p. 230). Times have changed since then, particularly in the range of different media available beyond the written and pictorial sources that the first amendment had in mind. Nevertheless, this legislation is an important national aspiration which is used to argue for media freedom. There have been many subsequent challenges to this absolute statement, in the form of court cases, new laws and systems of control and surveillance which seek to prevent the circulation of material which is deemed to be harmful to the public, libellous or in some other way objectionable. When an authority intervenes to limit media freedoms this is called censorship, and this censorship can become so ingrained into society that media either voluntarily or through various means of persuasion and regulation undertake their own self-censorship in order to avoid litigation and the negative effects of consumer disapproval. There are three main arguments which are advanced to challenge the absolute right to freedom of speech as guaranteed in the First Amendment, and in similar legislation in other countries. The first is that censorship is necessary to protect the young. The second is that censorship is necessary as a means to uphold standards of public decency, and the third is related to political ideologies, and the idea that censorship should be enforced in certain circumstances to deny criminals, terrorists and enemies of state any chance of promiting their views to the public at large. This paper examines these three arguments and maintains that censorship in all of these contexts is neither appropriate nor effective. It is self evident that both individuals and the state have a duty to protect the young from harm. Human infants are born defenceless, unable to feed and care for themselves, and unable to perceive or avoid all kinds of approaching dangers. It is equally obvious that these dangers can be physical or emotional, and some would argue also spiritual. Adults have a responsibility to ensure that children are protected from all kinds of harm, regardless what type, or from what source. It is a very big leap, however, to argue that censorship of the media is necessary to prevent children from running into material that is likely to cause them emotional distress or psychological damage. A useful analogy might be the case of electricity. Most adults know that electricity can be incredibly useful for a multitude of good and bad purposes, from keeping a hospital going, to providing warmth and power for domestic appliances, even to providing the means to carry out the death penalty in some states. It is a valuable commodity that can be dangerous as well as useful. It can be put to good, bad and questionable uses. No one argues that because electricity can kill people, it should not be freely accessible in a domestic setting. People recognise the dangers electricity can present and they train their toddlers from a very young age not to touch live sources of power. Sockets are covered up, and appliances are kept out of reach but by the time a child reaches school, there has been sufficient parental training and media reinforcement to equip children with the knowledge and skills they require to avoid the worst dangers of electricity and take increasing advantage of its many benefits. Just as it is with electricity, so it is with the media. Children must be taught from an early age to recognize any threats in the media, and deal with them in appropriate ways. Parents and teachers are guided in their efforts to do this by a regulatory framework that classifies books, films and video games with age appropriate ratings, and verbal descriptions of the content. Responsible parents will control their child’s access to these media in order to prevent them from accessing material unsuitable for their age group. Supervision is in order when children first make the transition into adult territory. Censorship on the grounds of harm to the young, though often cited as a major justification is therefore a red herring. A well-governed society has other measures in place to protect children, and so long as the media classify, package and market their wares according to the law on these matters, there is no reason to hold them responsible for harm that comes to children through accessing those media at an inappropriate age. Child trauma caused by watching x rated horror films, or playing very violent video games is not the fault of the game producers, it is the fault of ineffective parenting. The potential harm caused by media to children is exaggerated by many conservative opponents of media freedom. Most video game violence is in any case clearly cartoon-like and fictional, and children know very well that it is not real, just as much as they do when watching Tom and Jerry on the television. There is no evidence that media violence causes children to become more aggressive, and only a very weak correlation between media violence and crime. (Browne, 2005, p. 702). The truth is that the real reasons why people cite child protection in arguments for censorship are either a) that they want to offload responsibility for parenting to the state, or, b) at the other extreme, they want to their own narrow view of morality and prevent children from encountering any alternative views. This brings us to the second major argument against censorship: that of its role in upholding public decency. In a well-argued study of many US law cases brought against art exhibitors, publishers, the press and the media, Marjorie Heins concludes that “Like concerns about sex or vulgar words, concerns about media violence also have more to do with socializing youth than with objective proof of psychological harm” (Heins, 2001, p. 254).. The debate about media censorship usually makes us of statements using the terminology of offensiveness, vulgarity, indecency and these words come into play especially in connections with media content that deals with sex and/or violence. There is a difficulty, however, in determining exactly how to define such terms, because they can mean different things to different people, and it is not at all clear who has the right to draw the boundary lines between what is acceptable for public consumption and what is not. For some people even the mention of particular parts of the anatomy for scientific or educational purposes is taboo, and should not be allowed, while for others, colourful language and explicit imagery are an essential dimension in the range of expression that they consider normal. Rap musicians, for example, regularly run into problems with radio stations because of the use of taboo words, but they argue that the words have a different, less shocking meaning in rap culture, because they have become part of everyday expression in their cultural environment. What is normal for one group, is offensive for another. Many of the debates on media censorship therefore mirror a battle that goes on in society at large for the right to determine what society’s values should be. Sociologists agree with this analysis, and represent the whole domain of censorship as a power struggle between different political and social factions. Seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that there is often a hidden agenda behind many incidents of censorship. History is full of examples of minority groups whose interests have been suppressed by censorship in one era, only to be feted and promoted in another. Communist sympathizers were excluded from Hollywood productions during the infamous McCarthy era. In the same period the “norms” of white, middle class America ensured that inter-racial and homosexual relationships were banned from film and television in the early days of these media, through censorship boards, for example. Severe restrictions in the portrayal of romantic encounters led to lists of rules about actors having to retain one foot on the floor, or wear garments of particular dimensions, in order to remain within the bounds of the law. Some fifty years later, at the end of the twentieth century there are many positive and popular media portrayals of exactly these formerly forbidden themes and styles. Censorship in the visual media did not hold back the tides of change, but encouraged film makers to find ways around the rules, using inventive symbolism, for example. Censorship encourages creative minds to fight against it, and this is why there is, in a free society, an incremental erosion of its effectiveness over time. Censorship only ever works for a time, and eventually the norms that are widespread in society at large make themselves felt in the media also. In the years since the 9/11 atrocity attention has been drawn increasingly to the role of the media in potentially supporting terrorism. Some people believe that terrorists and everything about them should be suppressed because the media feed their agenda by giving them publicity. There are some covert attempts by Western governments and multinational technology companies to operate surveillance and censorship on the internet, which is a worrying trend (Deibert, 2008, p. 501). In China, which is far from an open and democratic country, there are very intrusive limits on what can be reported in the press and what people can post in blogs and other internet sites but at least they are openly stated. . Media discussion of the independence movement in Taiwan, or the resistance to China that is widespread in Tibet, or of past events like the Tiananmen Square incident, is not allowed in China. Despite this, the country is slowly opening up the internet to citizens. The image that the authorities use to describe this policy is that of a window being opened on an enclosed room. It is expected that flies will come in from outside, and the authorities will therefore swat these flies through censorship programs (MacKinnon, 2008, p. 33). It is tempting to view this tactic as an exercise in forlorn hope, but MacKinnon points out that observers who know China well can see a planned strategy of opening up slowly and in a controlled way to the inevitable encroachment of foreign ideas into what has been thus far an isolated enclave of communist ideology. In other words, what is happening in China is not so much censorship, as a controlled move towards freedom of the press. Even China recognizes that the benefits of globalization come at the price of opening up to ideas that are unpalatable in the Beijing corridors of communist power. Often a regime issues censorship of political ideas when it is afraid of any opposition. It is not a good idea to suppress the ideas of political opponents, even when these ideas are extreme and violent. It is far better to let them stand, but let also editorials, counter arguments and readers’ responses be published alongside them. All arguments need to be heard so that people learn to weigh them up and judge for themselves. Citizens in a globalized world should be learning how to think, not what to think. This equips them to deal with any unforeseen events, and to develop a strong moral sense based on facts, even when some of these facts are unpleasant and distasteful to most law-abiding citizens. The topic of censorship, then, turns out to be a much more complex issue in modern society than it first appears. It is not simply a matter of opposition between an oppressive state and a libertarian media landscape, but it is a complex arena in which societal norms are set, challenged, revised, and set again, reflecting changes in values through the years. There can be commercial reasons why a safe, non-provocative stance has been taken by certain media, at certain times, as noted in an internet journal recently: “Especially during the early years of film classification, family films that did not damage the reputation of the medium, turned out to be more profitable in the long run than the short-lived commercial successes of controversial films” (Bilteryest, 2008, p.1). The arguments outlined above show that censorship is not an effective way of stopping ideas from entering into the minds of citizens. Authoritarian rules are made to be broken, and the creativity of the media world is exactly the force that is most likely to chip away at restrictive rules. A far better strategy for those who are worried about social trends that are being reported and discussed in the media is to develop the skills of critical thinking, reason and argument to debate these contentious issues openly in the many media platforms that are available these days. People should not believe all they read in the media. Heavy censorship lulls them into a sense that someone is watching over them and removing anything disturbing. This may be an ideal good strategy for three to five year olds, whose parents surely have a duty to protect them from any harmful influences, but it is no way to run a country or regulate the media. It is time that lessons were learned from China, and that more citizens in the United States and elsewhere started to open up their minds and their media to a full, open and critical debate that addresses the issues that concern people most. Work Cited Biltereyst, Daniel. “Productive censorship. Revisiting recent research on the cultural meanings of censorship” Politics and Culture (2008/4). Retrieved from: Web. Browne, Kevin D. “The influence of violent media on children and adolescents: a public-health approach.” The Lancet 365 (2005), pp. 702-710. Retrieved from: Web. Deibert, Ronald J. “Black Code: Censorship, Suveillance, and the Militarization of Cyberspace. Millennium, Journal of International Studies 32 (3), pp. 5011-530. Retrieved from: Web. Heins, Marjorie. Not in Front of the children: ‘indecency’ censorship, and the innocence of youth. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. Print. Lewis, Jon. Hollywood V. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Print. MacKinnon, Rebecca. “Flatter world and thicker walls? Blogs, censorship and civic discourse in China.” Public Choice 134 (2008), pp. 31-46. Retrieved from: Web. Wilkinson, Paul. “The Media and Terrorism: A Reassessment. Terrorism and Political Violence 9 (2), (1997), pp. 51-64. Retrieved from: Web. Read More