Censorship

By media

Banned books · Banned films Re-edited film · Internet · Music Press · Radio  · Thought Speech and expression Video games

Methods

Book burning · Book challenging Bleeping · Broadcast delay Chilling effect Conspiracy of silence Content-control software Euphemism · Expurgation Financial  · Gag order Heckling · Memory hole Pixelization · Postal Prior restraint · Revisionism Self-censorship · Speech code Whitewashing · Verbal offence Strategic lawsuit

Contexts

Corporate · Political · Religious Ideological · Criminal speech Hate speech · Media bias Suppression of dissent

By country

Censorship · Freedom of speech

v • d • e

Political censorship exists when a government attempts to conceal, distort, or falsify information that its citizens receive by suppressing or crowding out political news that the public might receive through news outlets. In the absence of unflattering but objective information, people will be unable to dissent with the government or political party in charge. It is also the suppression of views that are contrary to those of the government in power. The government often has the power of the army and the secret police, to enforce the compliance of journalists with the will of the government to extol the story that the government wants people to believe, at times even with bribery, ruin of careers, imprisonment, and even assassination.

The word censorship comes from the Latin word censor, the job of two Romans whose duty was to supervise public behaviour and morals, hence 'censoring' the way people acted.

[edit] Journalist prison census

According to the 2008 prison census by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the world's biggest jailers of journalists are:^[1]

1. People's Republic of China
2. Cuba
3. Burma
4. Eritrea
5. Uzbekistan

[edit] Political censorship in practice

 

Nikolai Yezhov, the young man strolling with Stalin to his right, was shot in 1940. He was edited out from a photo by Soviet censors.^[2] Such retouching was a common occurrence during Stalin's reign.

Independent journalism did not exist in the Soviet Union until Mikhail Gorbachev became its leader; all reporting was directed by the Communist Party or related organizations. Pravda, the predominant newspaper in the Soviet Union, had a near-monopoly. Foreign newspapers were available only if they were published by Communist Parties sympathetic to the Soviet Union. All The People's Republic of China, which continues Communist rule in politics, if not in the controlled economy, employs some 30,000 'Internet police' to monitor the internet and popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Iraq under Arab socialist Saddam Hussein had much the same techniques of press censorship as did Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu but with greater potential violence.

Cuban media is operated under the supervision of the Communist Party's Department of Revolutionary Orientation, which "develops and coordinates propaganda strategies".^[3]

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Memory hole