Censorship

That is just the question I wish to ask you today. Recently, censorship in the media particularly, has come under intense criticism. There are those who firmly believe in censorship, and then there are those who, like me, believe that the process of the government going through materials ready for publication, deciding what we as an audience can and cannot see is plain wrong.

 One example of censorship being overused is the video game ‘Manhunt’, which was taken off our shelves around two years ago. It’s ironic how through the media (the sector which suffers the most from censorship), the game was portrayed as being the sole cause of a boy’s death. The game apparently ‘drove him to murder’. But surely he would have murdered whether the game was there or not? If a video game is going to make you kill someone, then you have to be psychotic in the first place, surely. If we’re going to ban a horror game for being too horrific then we should ban all horror films too. Why stop there? I remember I watched the children’s programme ‘Pingu’ when I was younger and more impressionable. After copying one of Pingu’s antics I found myself at the bottom of the stairs with a bruised head. So ban Pingu too.

 A phrase that goes hand in hand with censorship is political correctness. This is also a relatively new term that widely accepted in the U.K. However, the borders between what classes as politically correct and not are changing every week. For fear of being not politically correct, film and game publishers are tip-toeing around issues and ultimately producing less and less material. Of the material that is produced, key issues are missed out resulting in dour and drab pieces, with little meaning, purely produced to make money. For instance, did you know that the cult classic, “A Clockwork Orange” was banned here in the United Kingdom? The film is now considered to be one of Stanley Kubrick’s finest pieces and appeared in Time magazines top one hundred films of all time. Yet we had it banned.

 Freedom of speech is the concept of being able to speak freely without censorship, much like I am now. In our ‘democratic’ society most people believe they have freedom of speech. This is in fact not the case as many views are suppressed, diluted or banned. Due to the nanny state that we live in, writer’s views never see the light of day, unless they cannot in any way offend anyone. I’ve yet to see any film that managed to offend no one, or play a game that not one person found offensive. The truth is there’s always someone with a lot of time on their hands who has to spoil it for the rest of us. Believers in censorship argue that some media texts will encourage wrong doing and things that are morally unacceptable. That is true to some extent, but why ban them? If people are impressionable enough to act in the wrong way because they saw or heard something in the media, then chances are they will do some wrong regardless of whether what they heard was censored or not.