Censorship

A Beginner's Guide

Julian Petley

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780741383
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ever wonder what you're not being told?

When we think of the word "censorship", we imagine blacked out words and authoritarian political regimes of the past. However, censorship is alive and well today, and just as pervasive in capitalist democracies as repressive regimes. Offering a potted history of the phenomenon from the execution of Socrates in 399BC to the latest in internet filtering, Petley provides an impassioned manifesto for freedom of speech. Also explaining how media monopolies and moguls censor by limiting what news/entertainment they impart, this is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in global media in the information age.

1

Death and destruction

Undoubtedly, the most effective way of censoring someone whose views one does not wish to be heard is to kill them, or, failing that, to frighten them into silence. History is, unfortunately, littered with such figures, one of the most famous being Socrates, who was condemned to death in Athens in 399 BCE for his unorthodox beliefs and habits. A more recent example is provided by Steve Biko, who founded the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa in the late 1960s. His political activities caused him to be banned by the apartheid regime in March 1973, which meant that he was not allowed to speak to more than one person at a time, was restricted to certain areas, could not make speeches in public and could not even be quoted. On 17 August 1977, Biko broke his banning order by visiting Cape Town and was arrested at a police roadblock under the Terrorism Act No. 83 of 1967. Whilst in prison he was repeatedly tortured until, near death, he was transported in a police van 1,500 km to Pretoria, where there was a prison with hospital facilities. He died shortly after arrival on 12 September. In spite of his massive head injuries, the police claimed his death was the result of an extended hunger strike. No prosecutions were ever brought. Biko’s story is the subject of Donald Woods’ book Biko (1978), which formed the basis of Richard Attenborough’s film Cry Freedom (1987).

Today, however, it is most frequently journalists and those working with them who fall victim to this ultimate form of censorship.

Killing the messenger

On 16 June 2008, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, unveiled a light sculpture on the roof of BBC Broadcasting House in central London. Called ‘Breathing’, the 10m glass and steel cone projects into the air a beam of light 1km high every night during the BBC’s ten o’clock television news bulletin. The memorial’s inauguration followed the deaths in Afghanistan of two BBC journalists, Abdul Samad Rohani and Nasteh Dahir Faraah, but is dedicated to all news journalists, and those working with them, who have been killed whilst carrying out their work. As Rodney Pinder, the Director of the International News Safety Institute (INSI), which co-hosted the event with the BBC, put it: ‘These men and women are the unsung heroes of democracy, for without a free press there can be no freedom. This shaft of light in the capital of international journalism is a visual reminder of their sacrifice’, whilst the BBC Chairman Sir Michael Lyons said: ‘We are all reminded of the daily risks taken by journalists in some of the world’s most dangerous places. The implicit contract, whereby journalists place their lives at risk to help us understand the world and its events better, needs to be reaffirmed at moments like this’.

Threats to journalists, and not simply to those working in war zones, are now so severe worldwide that on 23 December 2006 the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted resolution 1738 which ‘condemns international attacks against journalists, media professionals and associated personnel’, reminds member states that, under the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their two additional protocols of 1977, such workers ‘engaged in dangerous professional missions in areas of armed conflict shall be considered as civilians and shall be respected and protected as such’, and reaffirms the need to bring to justice those involved in attacking them. Interestingly, the US has signed, but not ratified, the 1977 protocols.

Of course, war zones are extremely dangerous, but most journalists killed in such places, particularly Iraq, are deliberately targeted and not the random victims of battlefield fire. Meanwhile the number of journalists killed indiscriminately steadily rises as those involved in conflicts become increasingly reckless with regard to the safety of journalists – for example, the sixteen Serbian journalists who were killed when NATO forces destroyed by bombing the headquarters of Radio Television of Serbia in Belgrade on 23 April 1999 during the Kosovo War. Furthermore, ‘classical’ war between two or more sovereign powers has now become the exception rather than the rule, and in many contemporary conflicts, particularly those involving militias of one kind or another, it can be extremely difficult to determine who should be held accountable for breaches of the Conventions, let alone to prosecute them for such breaches. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising if some media organisations are unwilling to send journalists to certain war zones, but this inevitably threatens to diminish – and thus to some extent to censor – the global media coverage which these conflicts receive. The alternative – safely to ‘embed’ journalists with friendly forces – has been accused of running the risk of threatening their independence and objectivity, and thus of introducing a form of self-censorship. Furthermore, if journalists are seen to enjoy a close operational relationship with one of the belligerents in a conflict, this can fatally undermine precisely that perception of neutrality which is the basis of the legal protection for media workers in war zones.

However, by no means all journalists killed in the course of their work have been reporting from war zones. Indeed, quite the opposite. According to a report published by the International News Safety Institute, Killing the Messenger (http­:­/­/­www­.­newssafety­.­com­/­stories­/­insi­/­globalinquiry­.­htm), one thousand journalists and support staff died trying to report the news around the world between 1996 and 2006, an average of two a week. However, only one in four news media staff died covering war and other armed conflicts, and the great majority died in peacetime, working in their own countries. At least 657 men and women were murdered during this period, and only one in eight of their killers was prosecuted. Furthermore, in two-thirds of cases the killers were not even identified, and probably never will be, thus underlining the absence of full and proper investigations when a journalist or other news professional is killed. According to the report: ‘The top ten bloodiest countries over the past 10 years were Iraq, Russia, Colombia, Philippines, Iran, India, Algeria, the former republics of Yugoslavia, Mexico and Pakistan. Shooting was by far the greatest cause of death, accounting for almost half the total. Bombing, stabbing, beating, torture, strangulation and decapitation were also used to silence reporting. Some men and women just disappeared, their fate unknown’.

In recent times, the most prominent victim of such attacks was Anna Politkovskaya, the special correspondent for the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, who was well known for her investigative reports on corruption and human rights abuses, not least in Chechnya, and who was murdered on 7 October 2006. Since Vladimir Putin assumed the Russian presidency in 2000, at least twenty journalists, all of whom had angered powerful vested interests, have died in suspicious circumstances. Other high-profile journalists who have been murdered in the course of their work are Veronica Guerin, a reporter for the Sunday Independent newspaper in the Republic of Ireland, who investigated and wrote about Dublin’s drug trade and was murdered on 26 June 1996, and Martin O’Hagan, who worked for the Sunday World, in which he wrote about the criminal activities of the Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force. The newspaper’s Belfast offices were bombed twice, and O’Hagan himself received numerous death threats. He was murdered by the Loyalist Volunteer Force, a breakaway Loyalist faction, on 28 November 2001. No-one has ever been charged with his murder.

Such instances not only silence their victims for eternity, but they also act, and are intended to act, as a warning to others. Just how commonplace today is this ultimate form of censorship can also be gleaned from the Reporters Without Borders round-up of the state of press freedom worldwide in 2008 (http­:­/­/­www­.­rsf­.­org­/­article­.­php3?id­_article=­29797). This showed that in 2008 sixty journalists were killed, 929 were physically attacked or threatened, and twenty-nine were kidnapped. The Asia–Pacific and Maghreb–Middle East regions were the deadliest for the news media. After Iraq (with fifteen journalists killed), the two countries with the highest death tolls were Pakistan (seven) and the Philippines (six). Mexico remained an extremely dangerous place for journalists to work, with four journalists being murdered there. In Africa, the death toll fell from twelve in 2007 to three in 2008, but this was due to the fact that many journalists stopped working there, often going into exile, and to the gradual disappearance of news media in war zones such as Somalia. Nor is violence reserved only for those working in the traditional media; in 2008 a blogger in China was beaten to death by the municipal police whilst filming a demonstration, and around the world forty-five bloggers were physically attacked.

Reporters Without Borders’ Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2007 (http­:­/­/­www­.­rsf­.­org­/­article­.­php3?id­_­article­=­24025) showed that Eritrea has the unenviable distinction of coming at the bottom of the league, replacing North Korea. Of the twenty countries at the bottom of the index, seven were Asian (Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Laos, Vietnam, China, Burma and North Korea), five were African (Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Somalia and Eritrea), four were in the Middle East (Syria, Iraq, Palestinian Territories and Iran), three were former Soviet republics (Belarus, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), and one was in the Americas (Cuba). Russia featured at 144th place out of a total of 169.

Within the European Union, the murder of journalists is still relatively rare; however actual or threatened violence directed at journalists is both common and on the increase. On 3 May 2008, World Press Freedom Day, Reporters Without Borders published a report entitled European Union: Risks Faced by Journalists (http­:­/­/­www­.­rsf­.­org­/­article­.­php3?id­_­article­=­26769), which revealed a number of disturbing instances of overt intimidation of journalists in Demark, Sweden, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Italy, Spain and Northern Ireland. Fittingly, then, on 25 January 2007, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe passed a resolution which reminded member states of their legal obligation under Articles 2 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (which safeguard the right to life and the right to freedom of expression respectively) to ‘investigate any murders of journalists as well as acts of severe physical violence and death threats against them. This obligation stems from the individual journalist’s rights under the Convention as well as from the necessity for any democracy to have functioning media free from intimidation and political threats. Where attacks against journalists can be carried out with impunity, democracy and the rule of law suffer’. It also called upon national parliaments to ‘conduct parliamentary investigations into the unresolved murders of journalists as well as attacks and death threats against them, in order to shed light on individual cases and develop as a matter of urgency effective policies for the greater safety of journalists and their right to carry out their work without threats’.

Graven images

Another extreme form of censorship, although one whose target is not people but objects, is iconoclasm: the destruction or mutilation of visual representations of one kind or another, motivated by religion, politics or moral outrage, and carried out either officially on the orders of the authorities or in a less organised fashion by zealous members of the public. That this is a form of censorship is indubitable, and Margaret Aston’s remarks about Christian iconoclasm in sixteenth-century England apply equally well to all other forms of iconoclasm: ‘When the iconoclasts went to work they were concerned with attitudes as well as objects. They wanted to erase not simply the idols defiling God’s churches, but also the idols infecting people’s thoughts. They wanted to obliterate – mentally and physically’.¹ Such activity has a long history, one which long predates Christianity and is in fact as old as the process of image-making itself. As Aston puts it:

The defacing (or maiming) of a representation becomes a representative act: the damage to the seen is a way of hurting the unseen. One attacks the physical object in order to destroy the spiritual being that resides in it – or the system of belief to which it belongs. As long as people have believed in gods and fashioned stones in their honour, stone-breaking has held the capacity to effect a spiritual end. Breaking the holy image amounted to breaking a holy power.²

In Christian societies, much iconoclastic activity has its roots in the passage in the Book of Exodus which states: ‘You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath ... You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God’. In spite of this, the first substantial wave of iconoclasm did not take place in the Christian Church until the eighth century in Byzantium when the emperor Leo III and his successor Constantine V decreed that all images and idols were to be destroyed. The policy was reversed in the following century, however, and the issue did not arise again within Christianity in any widespread fashion until the Reformation in the sixteenth century, when it returned with a vengeance, especially amongst the followers of Jean Calvin in what are now the Netherlands and Belgium (where the iconoclastic fury was known as the beeldenstorm) and in parts of France, as well as in Copenhagen, Wittenberg, Münster, Augsburg, Zürich, Bern, Geneva and Basel. And, all too often, iconoclasm went hand in hand with another form of destruction, as no less than Martin Luther noted in 1525 when he warned that: ‘No one who sees the iconoclasts raging thus against wood and stone should doubt that there is a spirit hidden in them which is death-dealing, not life-giving, and which at the very first opportunity will also kill men, just as some of them have begun to teach’.³

In England the first wave of iconoclasm took place in the reign of Henry VIII (1509–47), with the first order to parochial clergy to take down certain kinds of images being issued in 1538, in order to avoid ‘that most detestable sin of idolatry’. The most spectacular results of this order were the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, and that of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. Iconoclasm was supported by Thomas Cranmer, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1532, and who, at the coronation of Henry’s successor, Edward VI (1547–53), called on the new king to see ‘idolatry destroyed, the tyranny of the bishops of Rome banished from your subjects, and images removed’.⁴ A series of injunctions issued in 1547 expressed the new king’s concern to see ‘the suppression of idolatry and superstition throughout all his realms and dominions’ and ordered the clergy to ‘forthwith take down or cause to be taken down and destroyed’ a remarkably wide range of images and objects and indeed to attempt to erase them entirely from popular memory.

This resulted in images in St Paul’s and most London churches being smashed. The process continued during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Thus in 1559 Archbishop Parker and a number of bishops issued ‘A Declaration of Certain Principal Articles of Religion’, Article X of which stated: ‘I do utterly disallow the extolling of images, relics and feigned miracles, and also all kind expressing God invisible in the form of an old man, or the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove, and all other vain worshipping of God, devised by men’s fantasies’.⁵ At Bartholomew’s Fair in Smithfield, at St Paul’s Churchyard and elsewhere in London and across the country, rood screens and other wooden images were publicly burned.

By the end of the sixteenth century, iconoclasm had become an accepted part of English religious orthodoxy, and from here it was not a great leap to the better known iconoclasm which expressed itself with a particular vengeance during the English Civil War (1642–51) and the Commonwealth period (1649–60), which followed the temporary abolition of the monarchy. Thus, for example, a Parliamentary Ordinance of 28 August 1643 stated that ‘all Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry should be removed and abolished’, specifying among other things altar rails and steps, crucifixes, crosses, images of the Virgin Mary, pictures of saints and ‘superstitious inscriptions’, and in May 1644 the scope of the Ordinance was widened to include representations of angels, rood screens, holy water stoups, organs, and images in stone, wood and glass and on plate. A clear picture of what this policy involved in practice is provided by the journal kept by William Dowsing, who was Provost-Marshall of the armies of the Eastern Association during the Civil War. In 1643 he was appointed by their Captain-General, the Earl of Manchester, as ‘Commissioner for the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition’. He described his work thus:

[In] Sudbury ... We brake down a picture of God the Father, 2 crucifix’s, and Pictures of Christ, about an hundred in all; and gave order to take down a Cross off the Steeple; and diverse Angels, 20 at least, on the Roof of the Church ... Dunstal ... We brake down 60 Superstitious Pictures; and brake in pieces the Rails; and gave order to pull down the Steps ... [At Clare College chapel, Cambridge] we brake down 1000 pictures superstitious; I brake down 200; 3 of God the Father, and 3 of Christ, and the Holy Lamb, and 3 of the Holy Ghost like a dove with wings.⁶

The practice of iconoclasm is not, however, only the preserve of the religious – revolutionaries, too, have a propensity for it, and, ironically, they likewise tend to employ it against religious symbols In France during the Revolutionary period (1789–99), iconoclasm in some places went far beyond the destruction of religious images; numerous churches and abbeys were entirely demolished (as at Cluny, for example, where one the largest churches in Christendom was essentially turned into a stone quarry); the Gregorian calendar (which had been instigated by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582) was replaced in 1793 by the French Republican calendar, which abolished Saints’ days and all other days with Christian associations; names of streets and places with Christian connotations were frequently changed (thus St Tropez becoming for a while Héraclée); whilst in Paris, during the period of the Cult of Reason, which flourished from 1792 to 1794, all churches were closed, the holding of Mass was forbidden and several churches were turned into Temples of Reason, including, on 10 November (20 Brumaire) 1793, Notre Dame itself.

When the Russian monarchy was abolished in 1917, its symbols, such as double-headed eagles and statues and paintings of tsars were the object of widespread iconoclastic fury, whilst most churches and cathedrals were either closed or demolished; some, however, were turned into ‘museums of atheism’, in which religious imagery served exactly the opposite purpose for which it had been created in the first place. Later, Stalinist iconography would quietly disappear from the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev ‘thaw’ which began in 1956, and later still, with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, red stars, imagery of Lenin and all the other visual paraphernalia of communism would be rather more dramatically swept away.

On 16 May 1966, as a result of a power struggle which had been brewing for some time within the Communist Party of China, Mao Zedong launched a campaign to rid China, and in particular the Party, of its ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Death and destruction
• 2 Indexes and licenses
• 3 Seals and ratings
• 4 Councillors and classifiers
• 5 Blocks and filters
• 6 Markets and moguls
• Conclusion: censorship and freedom of expression
• Endnotes
• Index