Censorship

CENSORSHIP

 

Prohibition of the production, distribution, circulation, or display of a work by a governing authority on grounds that it contains objectionable or dangerous material. The person who decides what is to be prohibited is called a censor. Commonly used methods include decree and confiscation, legislation, repressive taxation, and licensing to grant or restrict the right to publish.

 

The ALA Code of Ethics places an ethical responsibility on its members to resist censorship of library materials and programs in any form and to support librarians and other staff who put their careers at risk by defending library policies against censorship. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) maintains a Web page on Internet Censorship. Compare with suppressed. See also: banned book; book burning; challenge; clandestine publication; Comstock, Anthony; expurgated; filtering; Index Librorum Prohibitorum; intellectual freedom; Motion Picture Production Code; and precensorship.

Censorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful or sensitive, as determined by a censor. The rationale for censorship is different for various types of data censored:

• Moral censorship is the removal of materials that censor deems to be obscene or otherwise morally questionable. Pornography, for example, is often censored under this rationale, especially child pornography, which is censored in most jurisdictions in the world. In another example, graphic violence resulted in the censorship of the "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" movie entitled Scarface originally completed in 1932.
• Military censorship is the process of keeping military intelligence and tactics confidential and away from the enemy. This is used to counter espionage, which is the process of gleaning military information. Very often, militaries will also attempt to suppress politically inconvenient information even if those information has no actual intelligence value.

• Political censorship occurs when governments hold back secret information from their citizens. The logic is to prevent the free expression needed to rebel. Any dissent against the government is thought to be a "weakness" for the enemy to exploit.^{[citation needed]} Campaign tactics are also often kept secret: see the Watergate scandal.
• Religious censorship is the means by which any material objectionable to a certain faith is removed. This often involves a dominant religion forcing limitations on less prevalent ones. Alternatively, one religion may shun the works of another when they believe the content is not appropriate for their faith.
• Corporate censorship is the process by which editors in corporate media outlets intervene to halt the publishing of information that portrays their business or business partners in a negative light. Privately owned corporations in the business of reporting the news also sometimes refuse to distribute information due to the potential loss of advertiser revenue or shareholder value which adverse publicity may bring. See media bias.

precensorship

The restriction of materials from a library collection during the selection process by a collection development librarian or other person authorized to select, based on conscious or unconscious bias. Although the Library Bill of Rights of the American Library Association (ALA) charges librarians to "provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues," some studies have found that librarians tend to avoid selecting potentially controversial books and media. The prefix "pre" added to the term "censorship" indicates that restriction occurs before library materials are made available to patrons. Compare with censorship.