Censorship

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2005

I keep finding more and more insightful or otherwise interesting articles on useless-knowledge. For instance, an article on press censorship. A small quote from the article:

Now, I do recall a certain FIRST AMENDMENT in the Constitution that prohibits censorship. Furthermore, there is a reason that we have free press. It is to keep us informed of what is actually going on so that we are not fed propaganda. If the government is allowed to censor any articles that they want, then we can be led into a completely false idea of the world.
— Jack Lepiarz, Should Government Censor Newspapers?

I’m particularly interested by this line “to keep us informed of what is actually going on so that we are not fed propaganda”. It made me wonder about something. Is the press really telling us ‘what is going on’, or is it in fact already spreading propaganda? I’ll explain what I mean:

I’m fairly sure that the press in my country is free. Ever since we’ve seen some terrorist activity here, our press has gone the same way as the U.S media. We are being bombarded with terrorist threat news-items. Suddenly, the press is making it seem like they’re everywhere. Some months ago, it was not uncommon if the media reported three or more bomb-threats a day, most of which were fakes.

How is this relevant? It’s not. Not for my country, at least. However, it is relevant in the U.S. There, the presidential candidates made a big point of terrorism. It was, in fact, probably the most important thing on the political agenda. And both candidates used the press to push their political agenda. “Vote for me, and terrorism will be fought.”, “Vote for me and we’ll end this non-sense.”

So, even though perhaps it wasn’t meant that way, the press coverage of terrorism had become propaganda. Even without being censored. Does this mean we might as well censor the media, since it won’t matter? I don’t believe so. Yes, there will be positive uses of censorship. A highly moral governing body might use it to stop ‘popular’ and ‘hot news’ reporting, which I think would be a good thing. It is however more likely that censoring will be misused to push even more political agenda’s even faster and more effectively.