Censorship: What's the big bleeping deal?

Ah, the infamous censorship bleep. Our mid-afternoon television viewing experience just wouldn't be the same without this oh-so familiar tool of social decency. Along with its notorious television sibling the “blur blob,” these two heroes of the airwaves act as the guardians of public propriety and civility.

Sure, there's always those fun to read redacted government documents with their blacked-out sentences, but there's nothing like the deliberate visual and audible obscuring applied to otherwise untampered music and video to make the entertainment experience all the more exciting.

So what's the problem with a little appropriately applied censorship?

There is something that makes me uneasy whenever I witness an instance of subjective media manipulation, in other words, the censoring of traditional print or broadcast media. These days, seemingly everything in the American public realm – at least those items which fall within Federal Communication Commission jurisdiction (or is borderline First Amendment) -- is subject to this principle of necessary conformity.

Nature gives us few options in regard to our visual and aural senses. The former, vision, operates in two modes: either eyes opened or eyes closed. If you are going to look, you are going to see what it is you're looking at. You can't sort of see it, and as much as you would like to forget an image you simply can't unsee it. Like a kid in a scary movie, it's entirely up to the viewer to subject themselves to such visuals.

Hearing, however, has no such shut off capability. You hear things whether or not you want to, which makes that annoying aural bleep of the censor all the more unnatural. If nature had given us the capability to turn off our hearing, our world would be as incomprehensible as those highly censored videos on MTV...

...talk about an exercise in futility. My personal favourite are the radio-friendly gangsta-rap songs that quietly omit any offensive or vulgar language. I'm not sure why they even bother with the effort, as the final edit ends up being so heavily sanitized so as to be completely unintelligible and of no audible or artistic value.

Then there's the ten second delay on those live awards ceremonies and sports performances, the “no swearing before 10pm” rule on network TV, no blood in PG movies (even though the heavily edited TV version of the same film still shows the guy getting all shot to hell), the blurring of the guy flipping the bird, the blurring of the offending cussing mouth, etc. (checkout Jimmy Kimmel's "This week in unnecessary censorship" for a satirical take on this -- but be warned!)

Not that I'm advocating a nihilist media viewing experience. But in the real world of flesh and blood, censorship does not exist. Kids are exposed to all manner of vulgarity, whether we let them be or not. And from what I can tell it doesn't turn them into little foul mouthed f-bomb dropping sailors.

Kids are smart enough to know that swearing or cussing is wrong, given they've received some moral direction in this topic and it's been modelled by a parent. So I don't see some hypothetical landslide into moral oblivion if the censor button guy were to go on permanent vacation. But what about the rest of us?

Censorship has traditionally been a construct for the protection of public and private decency. It supposedly promotes those things that we as a society value; as well as those which we shun, mark as taboo, or simply don't wish to see or acknowledge.

Understandably, censorship and propaganda often go hand in hand. Dictatorships and democracy's alike censor negative news out of concern for ongoing public support for the war effort, often masked by the guise of national security. This was usually done easily enough during those early years of war correspondence when the entire reporting cycle -- from filming through to the distributing of the news reels -- was measured in days, if not weeks.

But by the time Vietnam rolled around reports from the battlefront was a near daily occurrence. The Persian Gulf War saw a quantum leap forward with the advent of satellite transmissions – but it wasn't until the 2003 Gulf War that we truly experienced the revolution in information dissemination brought about by the Internet.

In an effort to better control the flow of battlefield information, most Western governments introduced a policy embedding journalists into military units. This satisfied the governments duty to the writ of law regarding a free press, while also giving the public an idea of the situation on the ground. It is also an excellent way to shape public perception of the war, and helps keep an eye on what is or is not revealed about the realities of the conflict.

But the Internet age is a double edged sword. Inevitably things like Abu Ghraib or Wikileaks happen, side skirting the censor altogether. This information diffusion is beyond any containment “system” traditionally employed, and has led to a paradigm shift in the way societies censure or don't censure material, as well as the means by which individuals avoid such censorship .

Never before has humankind seen such a plethora of non-censored material – that is, information that has not been subjectively qualified in accordance with cultural standards of decency and acceptability. If Western publications enforce censorship on a particular image, or a publication band prohibits the naming of names or the like -- it doesn't take much effort to locate that information from a non-quarantined online source.

Despite the best attempts of authoritarian (and democratic) governments to control their populations access to contraband images, audio and subject matter -- proxy servers and other ingenious methods allow individuals to bypass such safeguards.

Censorship is also progressive. What can be shown on TV and film today would be unthinkable in the 1940's. And this isn't just limited to cursing, sex or violence. Topics openly and regularly discussed on such banal shows as The View were simply taboo back in the day. Values morph from generation to generation, and it's no surprise to see the censor keeping step with these changes.

So what could be wrong about creating an appropriate and safe environment for children? Remember that Supreme Court ruling regarding those fleeting expletives tossed around on Sunday afternoon football? Quite hilariously the Court's decision regarding the FCC Vs. Fox TV row resulted in them penalizing Fox for not adequately bleeping players unscripted cussin'.

I'm not sure what this says about us as a society, but I'm determined not to fine any of my loose-tongued friends and relatives for their occasional indecent slip ups.   

In particular, media companies will always self-censor even without a state imposed mandate. They have a knack of feeling out the times, as if attuned to the pulse of the masses. These entities are aware of what the people find “repulsive,” and they often sense a growing grassroots shift regarding an emerging viewpoint or moral shift.

Recent trends regarding this interpretation of popular sentiment usually include the censuring of anything that smacks of homophobic, racist, intolerant or hateful language. Incidentally, this list is also extremely subjective. These trends usually gain momentum when endorsed by “people of influence.” While certainly not a fan of derogatory language, I don't think there was as much aversion to the word “nigger” until Oprah banned the word from being spoken in her presence. As if ushering in a divine revelation, suddenly every major print and television based media company instantly blacklisted the word, instead referring to it as the "N" word or simply fuzzing it out.

American censorship is probably stricter and more invasive then any other Western nation, especially when it comes to vulgar words and sexual content. European society may be seen as more progressive in this latter area, with nudity and sexual content seen as minimally offensive. On the other hand, depictions of simulated and actual violence in North American television and film are an order of magnitude higher than in Europe.

However the standards by which material is subject to censorship varies significantly between countries, and can even be broken down further to differences in viewpoints within a particular subset or minority group. 

Cultural preferences certainly play a factor in the decision to censor, especially when religious and ethnic values are brought into the equation. Those racy bus shelter ads featuring mostly nude women selling soap or perfume or cereal simply do not exist in places like Saudi Arabia or Iran. But these same cultures will happily broadcast the “beheading of the week”-- and without the annoying blur blob to boot.

Curiously, censorship is primarily directed towards domestic consumption. Its enforcement has typically been attained through a combination of voluntary and coercive methods – call it church and state respectively – that, when placed within a framework of limited media offerings creates an environment which is extremely effective at filtering out all that “undesirable” information.

But I understand that there is a vital distinction between what is indecent and what is obscene-- between the things we would rather avoid, and those horrible things that should never be witnessed regardless of age or belief system. And I think for the most part that is something we all can agree on.