Censorship is necessary to protect the public

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Monday 26th March 2001

“Censorship is necessary to protect the public.”

How far do you agree with this view?

Censorship is the term used to describe the editing of the media to control public access to whole or specific media texts.

A view held by some is that the media has a strong influence on people, and in some cases is responsible for the drastic actions of some individuals, for example the murder of toddler James Bulger by two young boys. Generally, proponents of this view believe in the most stringent censorship. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the liberal opinion is that the public have a right to choose themselves whether they personally are exposed to certain media material or not. Effectively, this means no censorship at all.

In recent years when prices have descended, multimedia technology has advanced daily and disposable incomes have risen; video recorders and access to the internet are increasingly to be found in the homes of the public. This has led to an increase in availability, through various circumstances, of controversial materials which contain elements such as violence, racism and pornography. With the internet in particular, it is challenging to control who is exposed to it, exactly what people are being exposed to and the serious consequences it may be having.

When a country is at war, few can argue that a certain degree of censorship is required. It is necessary to limit the public’s access to sensitive material concerning the war, such as strategies and the details of conferences, so the enemy cannot use the information to their advantage. While this form of censorship is understandable, it presents the problem of too much information being held back making the state totally in control, and the possible cover-up of a government faux-pas.

However, in the past few years, standards have generally seemed to relax. The watershed, a guideline implemented to stop offensive material being broadcast on terrestrial television before 9.00pm, is not as stringent as it once was, with mild bad language and some nudity shown before this time. For example, certain milder profanities have recently been uttered on Coronation Street, the hugely popular soap that is broadcast at 7.30pm. Also, the limits to what is acceptable have been pushed back, with most terrestrial television channels showing violence and scenes of nudity, and in this era, a book is rarely banned on account of obscenities, a fate that became D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’ in the 1960s.

Arguments surrounding censorship are generally regarding sex and obscenity, bad language, violence, religion and racism. Usually, the issue is that there is too much of the aforesaid negative content present in media texts, for example, explicit sex in certain Channel Five programmes. In contrast, in some instances the argument concerns freedom of choice; some think that the public should be able to decide for themselves whether they are exposed to certain media, while others feel that the public should not have to run the risk of being exposed to offensive material.

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Other controversial subjects are politics and ownership and control of the media. For example, if one company has control of a vast part of the media, they may be exploiting it for their own gains, and sometimes, a company will produce material that is biased, and so gives the public a distorted view. For example, the “City Slickers” otherwise known as stockbrokers, of the Daily Mirror, were recently sacked for recommending companies in which they had just bought shares, so that the public would buy them, resulting in the companies being worth much more and therefore making a profit ...

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