Most of us experience a gentle form of censorship from an early age. That’s what mothers are for. There are certain things that must not be said, and some things that should not even be thought. It’s called socialization, and what parents do or should do. There is a very real sense in which this early censorship of words and actions, which teaches us how to grow up, is the essential condition of civilization. We can resist it, or ignore it, but mostly we accept it because we eventually realize how unthinkable the alternative would be.
During my lifetime, movies, books, television, and radio have all been routinely censored, for moral or political reasons, and I never gave it much thought until recently. These restrictions were justified by a paternalistic desire to protect people, especially young people, from that messy and painful thing called reality. It never worked for long; reality always caught up with our innocence eventually. Of course, now that the anarchic world of the Internet is available on every child’s cell phone, the very idea of protecting young people has become ridiculous.
But we can still distinguish between censorship for protection and censorship for repression, which is designed to restrict free speech. This kind of top-down censorship affects not just you personally but the entire culture and is typical of authoritarian regimes like China or Russia. There is nothing that such regimes fear more than free speech and free thought. So, they aim to control the flow of information, and the institutions that promote it – libraries, schools, museums and the media.
Public Broadcasting has become a target under the present regime. For sixty years, it has been supported by different governments as a commercial-free zone for news, cultural, and educational programming. Inevitably, like the proverbial small boy who blurted out that the emperor had no clothes, public media have revealed some inconvenient truths and promoted some controversial debates. This is where censorship comes in. In this case, as you know, it has come in the form of a crippling financial penalty from a government that doesn’t like this kind of free and open broadcasting.
It seems that free speech is not quite so free anymore. The price has gone up. But we are not about to give up on it and, because you are the public in public radio, we really need your support.
