News media censorship

Definition: The suppression of news reporting

Significance: An informed, activist public is championed as the basis of democracy; censorship of the news media undermines democracy

Censorship has a long and scurrilous history that dates back to long before the invention of the printing press. Censorship’s longevity has not contributed to a universal understanding of what censorship is or of the various forms in which it is manifested. Definitions of censorship are as varied and numerous as the scholars, politicians, and lexicographers who address the subject.

Historically, censorship can be placed into three basic categories: religious censorship, political censorship, and censorship of obscenities. Religion was an early source of censorship, with religious institutions punishing nonbelievers and infidels for blasphemy and heresy. Next came the censorship of unacceptable political ideas, with the disloyal renegades who disagreed with the prevailing powers being prosecuted for treason. In more recent times, punishment has been given to those who utter obscenities, distribute pornography, or even want to discuss safe sex.

Censorship of News

In the twentieth century a fourth important category—the censorship of news—came to be. Concurrent with the advent of television, the increasing value of information, and the power of advertising, news media censorship and self-censorship became a powerful influence. This critical form of censorship disturbs the free flow of news that warns a society of its problems. Without freedom of the press, a society becomes vulnerable to censorship of other forms, including religion, politics, and morals. Ironically, the United States, without equal in the twentieth century in terms of communications technology, appears to have suffered a breakdown when it comes to communications content. High technology does not guarantee a well-informed society.

As a result of late-twentieth century advances in communications technology, combined with the explosion in computer sciences, the average citizen became exposed to more information, at a greater speed, from throughout the world, as well as space, than had been available to political leaders not too many years before. In the twenty-first century, the reach of technology expanded dramatically with the introduction of smartphones and other mobile devices and social media. The transmission of news is global and instantaneous and has done much to change the way news media operates.

But the problem has not been with the quantity of information available, which sometimes seems to reach an overload level, but rather with the quality of that information. When a problem arises, there should be a warning signal—information—that alerts citizens that something is wrong that needs attention and resolution. An aware and informed populace could then influence its leaders to act upon that information in an effort to solve the problem. For such to happen, society needs a watchdog press to issue those warning signals. This should be the role of a free and aggressive press. Instead, critics have argued that the media have become the willing tools of the propagandists. Jacques Ellul warns in Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1968) that corporate, political, and military propagandists have become so skilled that the public is often not even aware it is being manipulated.

Media Monopoly

The primary sources of news and information for most people have come under the control of a small group. As media scholar Ben Bagdikian points out in The Media Monopoly (1992), fewer than twenty corporations controlled, at that time, most of the nation’s mass media. Such a monopolistic control of the media promotes and enhances certain issues and individuals and provides limited or no coverage to other issues and individuals.

The media might not conspire to control the media messages, but there is little doubt that they share personal values and interests, which influence those messages. Thus, it is not surprising to find a variety of factors operating, when combined, that lead to the systematic failure of the news media to fully inform the public. While such is not an overt form of censorship, it is real and dangerous.

Reasons for Censorship

The traditional explanations for why some stories are not covered are plentiful. Sometimes a source for a story is not considered to be reliable. Other times the story does not have an easily identifiable beginning, middle, and end. Some stories are considered to be too complex for the general public. Stories are ignored because they are not reported in a big name newspaper, such as the The New York Times. Reporters and editors at other media outlets, electronic as well as print, know their news judgment is not going to be challenged when they produce and publish stories that someone else has already found important, a practice that leads to the herd phenomenon in journalism.

Another major factor contributing to media self-censorship is that the censored story is considered potentially libelous. The long and costly jury trials, and sometimes multi-million-dollar judgments against the media, that can come from libel suits have produced a massive chilling effect on the press. Another reason why some stories are not covered is that they do not fit the conventional definitions of news.

Real news is objective and reliable information about important events that affect the lives of the public. The widespread dissemination of such information helps people become better informed, and a better informed public can elect politicians who are more responsive to its needs.

The explanation for much of the censorship that occurs in the mainstream media is the media’s bottom line. Corporate media executives perceive their primary, and often sole, responsibility to be to maximize profits, not inform the public. Many of the stories that can be cited as undercovered, overlooked, or censored are contrary in some way to the financial interests of publishers, owners, stockholders, or advertisers. Investigative journalism, moreover, is more expensive than the so-called public stenography school of journalism that came to dominate the field in the twentieth century. Stenography journalism is when the reporter takes down quotes or what is presented as fact by a source and reporting it without analysis or without verifying the source's claims. Respected news outlets have come under fire for this practice. For example, in 2012 New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane garnered criticism for an article where he questioned what more was wanted of journalists, and whether they should act as "truth vigilantes" with ruthless fact checking. Taking what political officials say as fact without verifying, however, can result in a form of censorship, where an official's stance can become printed fact.

News Media Censorship

Project Censored, the national news media research project founded in 1976, focuses on this new form of censorship and offers the definition of news media censorship:

First, it assumes that real and meaningful public involvement in societal decisions is possible only if a wide array of ideas are allowed to compete daily in the media marketplace for public awareness, acceptance, and understanding.

Next, it recognizes that the mass media, particularly the network television evening news programs, are the public’s primary sources of information for what is happening in the world. If, however, the public does not receive all the information it needs to make informed decisions, then some form of news blackout is taking place. While network news is still a major source of information for many Americans, online sources—including both official media sites and social media in particular—have become a significant source of news, and in some cases have eclipsed more traditional forms of media.

In brief, then, news media censorship is defined as the suppression of news, whether purposeful or not, by any method—including bias, omission, under-reporting, or self-censorship—that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in the world.

A classic example of news media censorship is in the story of cigarette smoking and cancer.

Cigarettes and Cancer

In 1933 Dr. Raymond Pearl, of the Department of Biology at The Johns Hopkins University, launched a study of smokers to explore the influence of tobacco on human longevity. In 1938 he released the results of his study of seven thousand subjects, which concluded that tobacco shortens the life of everyone who uses it. The study, an early warning signal about the dangers of smoking, was ignored by the major news media. Journalist and media critic George Seldes recounts in Never Tire of Protesting (1968) how America’s press suppressed that and other stories that reflected badly on a major advertiser, the tobacco industry.

In 1995 the American Medical Association, in a rare single-subject issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, exposed the tobacco companies for their long cover-up of the hazards of smoking. The special issue and its extraordinary implications were well publicized in the national news media. The herd effect overcame the tendency to self-censor.

In December, 1983, a decade earlier, the New York State Journal of Medicine, another well-respected medical journal, published a similar single-subject issue on the link between tobacco and cancer. The national news media ignored the story at that time. Since 1938, there were many stories about the dangers of tobacco that deserved, but did not receive, page-one treatment.

On January 16, 1939, Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior under Franklin D. Roosevelt, participated in a nationally broadcast Town Hall of the Air program. During the program, Ickes announced: “I understand that at Johns Hopkins University there is a very sensational finding resulting from the study of the effect of cigarette smoking that has not appeared, so far as I know, in any newspaper in the United States. I wonder if that is because the tobacco companies are such large advertisers.”

News censorship by corporation and advertiser influence persists, but governments (even in democracies) are not innocent of censorship. Those censorship practices have extended to the Internet. For example, Google reported that the second half of 2011 alone, the US government made 187 requests for the search engine to remove search links to specific web content.

Fighting News Media Censorship

In addition to Project Censored, a number of organizations have begun to fight news media censorship. Such groups include Article 19, First Amendment Congress, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Freedom Forum, Media Alliance, National Coalition Against Censorship, People for the American Way, Student Press Law Center, and the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press.

Bibliography

Bennett, Philip, and Moises Naim. "21st-Century Censorship." Columbia Journalism Review, Jan./Feb. 2015, archives.cjr.org/cover‗story/21st‗century‗censorship.php. Accessed 30 Apr. 2018.

Boyle, Kevin, ed. Article 19: Information, Freedom, and Censorship. New York: New York Times, 1988. Print.

Greenwald, Glenn. "Arthur Brisbane and Selective Stenography." Salon, Salon Media Group, 13 Jan. 2012. Web. 25 Nov. 2015.

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Random, 2002. Print.

Huff, Mickey, Andy Lee Roth, and Project Censored, eds. Censored 2016: The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2014-15. New York: Seven Stories, 2015. Print.

Liston, Robert A. The Right to Know: Censorship in America. New York: Watts, 1973. Print.