In present-day China censorship is all above board. The state controls the media, so the state controls the message. In the west, especially in the US of late, censorship is more subtle, and so perhaps more insidious.
Last night the local PBS station ran Bill Moyers’ documentary, Buying the War, that was first aired in April. One of the more compelling themes, or subplots, that ran throughout the program was the amount of fear that now exists in American newsrooms – both in television and newspapers. This fear has led to a kind of self-censorship that has cast a cloud over American journalism.
Given enough time censorship leads to a kind of dissociative disorder in society. A kind of amnesia that develops over time. It works something like this: what was so no longer is so. And what is the evidence that it is not so? Because if it were so, then the media would have written and talked about it. And when we search the media archives, we find little, if any, discussion of what was so.
American journalism still seems to have some self-correcting aspects to it that allow for “facts” to emerge now and then. Many of the lies and deceptions that the current administration perpetrated on the American citizenry are gradually coming to light. The aluminum tubes, the WMDs, the Niger yellowcake are now firmly embedded in the cultural memory. Of course there is no way to know what other deceptions and exaggerations are still festering beneath the surface.
The full impact of censorship may only be learned over time. As younger generations begin to move up in the media consumption food chain, they may be completely unaware of the world that immediately preceded them – the world that the previous generation called “current events”. News “black holes” eventually can lead to a revisionist view of recent history, and that bodes ill for the generations that follow.
The ultimate irony about censorship is that it can lead to inadvertent revelation. A case in point involves a recent classified ad that appeared in a newspaper in China. The small ad was a tribute/memorial to the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre a generation ago. As it happened the young copyreader was a new hire, just recently graduated from college. She did not know about the massacre because of the news blackout and the central government’s censorship policy.
When a people attempt to keep secrets from themselves, such secrets have a way of bubbling up in unpredictable ways.
We can only hope that some of the “unattractive facts” that were suppressed in the run up to the war in Iraq may also bubble in equally unpredictably ways, but in a more timely manner.
