Censorship: pros and cons, or a matter of degree
My Pet Jawa is advocating censorship: The whole point of my post was that context is everything. Freedom of speech cannot mean the same thing in a time of war that it means in a time of peace.
These are my comments: All nations currently have some level of censorship on speech that would undermine the security of the state, or incite violence. The global community recently sentenced two journalists to 40 years for broadcasting calls to murder civilians in Rwanda. The question is what level of censorship for the necessary for the continued existance of the state, not whether censorship is moral or an infrigement of rights. Ths social contract includes a limitation on speech that is harmful to society. Where the rights of individuals confront the rights of states, sometimes the state must win in order for the individual to survive. The question is not is censorship moral but what is the least amount required by the current circumstances.
The reason all states must censor some speech all the time is because popular speech is a powerful thing. The modern media can shift billions of people with a sound bite. It is the duty of the media to remain an impartial observer. To a large degree, the print media has become an interested party, a player, and a constituent of goverment, effectively shirking its duty as the fourth estate. The confluence of major media and academic instiutions may have an impact a great as the military/industrial complex so discussed in the nineteen-fifties.
That the media outlets are increasinly supplemented by the web may be a testiment to consumer dissatisfaction. A hopeful thought, which first came to mind in response to the Commissar’s post The Blogsphere Needs A Bar Mitzvah, is that the bloggers can be the counterweight to the elite media and al-Jazeera, as the millions of new hits generated by the death of Nick Berg demonstrates. In this manner, the market will censor the media.
Demosophia notes It’s almost a given that it would develop a herd mentality. The effect of major media censorship would be to slow down the propagation of a highly distorted news pattern, and it’s the very weight that we give “big media” that provides that power to distort.
Adam Khan seems to agree: Hating America is now a multi-billion dollar industry and its value chain–from school teachers and college professors to Hollywood to the music industry to opinion columnists–must be countered. Only this will put an end to the endless conspiracy theories about America and, truth be told, that is what some on the Left fear and that is why they are trying so hard to sabotage the mission in Iraq.
The whole discussion of fundamental issues is of course an imperial decree from Emperor Misha I who started the whole thing by defending a uniform standard of free speech when he said: Well, in a FREE society, the only proper answer is: NOTHING. I don’t give a shit how stupid, wrong or just plain ignorant the kid’s poem is, she has a G-d given right to write it and mean it. But not at THIS school. Oh no. Turns out that the principal learned his lessons REAL well when he studied fascism. Learned how to implement it, that is.
For my view of the importance of a free press in a democracy, here is an article.
