The controlling of access to and dissemination of information, especially on political and moral grounds. In its extreme form, it involves the wholesale banning of information, including works of fiction, enforced by the imposition of penalties against offenders. As such it is a characteristic of authoritarian states, which seek to regulate the flow of information, opinion, and expression. This is usually justified by reference to state security, the public interest, and good taste. In contemporary democracies, the term usually has wholly negative connotations. Such societies pride themselves on the freedoms enjoyed by their people, including the right of free expression, often enshrined in law (eg the First Amendment to the US Constitution). But censorship plays a part in even the most enlightened and progressive of societies, its legitimacy deriving from an assumed consensus on what is and is not acceptable at a particular time. Organizations of all kinds have certain secrets which need to be protected for reasons of security, confidentiality, and personal privacy. Such information will be classified to some degree, and be restricted to those authorized to receive it. Problems arise when the censoring of information is believed to be against the wider public interest, insofar as it is used to conceal incompetence, corruption, and crime.
Art in all its forms has always been prone to censorship, often due to the desire of artists to extend the boundaries of taste and to challenge authority. For example, in the British theatre it was not until 1968 that managements ceased having to submit manuscripts of plays for approval by the official censor, the Lord Chamberlain. Formal pre-censorship of this kind is uncommon today in the West. One major exception is film and video recordings, which are usually previewed by a board of censors, before being released for public consumption, with cuts if required. Since 1972 the monthly periodical Index on Censorship has campaigned against abuses of the fundamental right of free expression throughout the world.
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Censorship is the editing, removing, or otherwise changing speech and other forms of human expression. The visible motive of censorship is often to stabilize, improve or persuade the society group that the censoring organization would have control over. Furthermore, discussion of censorship often includes less formal means of controlling perceptions by excluding various ideas from mass communication.
Sanitization (removal) and whitewashing are almost interchangeable terms that refer to a particular form of censorship via omission, which seeks to "clean up" the portrayal of particular issues and/or facts that are already known, but that may be in conflict with the point of view of the censor.
Types
Most public speech depends on an organized forum such as a court or town meeting, or on technologies such as paper, the printing press, radio, television, or the Internet. Most often, censorship does not seek to ban certain ideas "in a vacuum," but rather to restrict what may be said in particular media of communication.
In England, censorship began with the introduction of copyright laws, which gave the Crown the permission to license publishing.
Censorship can be explicit, as in laws passed to prevent select positions from being published or propagated (e.g., the People's Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Australia, and The United States), or it can be implicit, taking the form of intimidation by government, where people are afraid to express or support certain opinions for fear of losing their jobs, their position in society, their credibility, or their lives.
Subject matter
The rationale for censorship is different for various types of data censored. Additionally, military censorship may involve a restriction on information or media coverage that can be released to the public such as in Iraq, where the U.S. government restricts the photographing or filming of dead soldiers or their caskets and its subsequent broadcast in the U.S. This is done to avoid public reaction similar to that which occurred during the Vietnam War or the Iran Hostage Crisis.
State secrets and unwanted attention
In wartime, explicit censorship is carried out with the intent of preventing the release of information that might be useful to an enemy. During World War I letters written by British soldiers would have to go through censorship. The World War II catchphrase "Loose lips sink ships" was used as a common justification to exercise official wartime censorship and encourage individual restraint when sharing potentially sensitive information.
A well-known example of sanitization policies comes from the USSR under Stalin, where publicly used photographs were often altered to remove people whom Stalin had condemned to execution. More
recently, the official exclusion of television crews from locales where coffins of military dead were in transit has been cited as a form of censorship. This particular example obviously
represents an incomplete or failed form of censorship, as numerous photographs of these coffins are often printed in newspapers and magazines.
School textbooks
The content of school textbooks is often the issue of debate, since their target audience is young people, and the term "whitewashing" is the one commonly used to refer to selective removal of critical or damaging evidence or comment.
Also, some religious groups have at times attempted to block the teaching of evolution in schools, as evolutionary theory appears to contradict their religious beliefs. The teaching of sexual education in school and the inclusion of information about sexual health and contraceptive practices in school textbooks is another area where suppression of information occurs.
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