"Censorship in China" by Jiao Guobiao

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

In the article entitled "Censorship in China" I was very surprised by how frank Jiao Guobiao was in discussing how mainland China controls information in an effort to isolate China from the outside world.

While I was reading this article, I thought to myself does the United States have a form of censorship? I wanted to explore that concept a little bit more. I'm not sure if we're censored or if news is used to create a political ideology for the masses.

We are inundated with so much information, so much technology, so much access to finding out what is going on in the world, that instead of searching for answers, we rely instead on major newspapers or news journalists, who break down information down to us in a message that we believe without questioning.

And it is very likely that whatever stories are covered in press, internet, or on T.V. is what a producer/politician/C.E.O. of somesort thinks the American public needs to know and that puts are an American slant on the news.

I wonder if the free press and anti censorship laws we have in the United States, are really that effective in creating informed citizens in a country that is fat with news, press, and opinions.

It's seems like in some ways these censorship laws in China have created an activist group that is closely monitoring the Central Propaganda Department. Because there is monitoring, there may be more hope for change.

[Anonymous]

While not as blatant and as pervasive as China's censorship, the U.S. has far more censorship than its citizens are aware of. Perhaps, because it is less well known, it is even more dangerous to our form of government which depends on an informed electorate (or, at least the possibility of an informed electorate.) Even before George W. Bush became president, news was "managed" in many ways, including by supplying TV new outlets with pre-packaged stories about current issues and events.

Since Bush and the Patriot Act have become part of the American government, the variety and quantity of censorship has greatly increased. The L.A. Times just this past weekend reported on the far greater number of documents that have been marked as "classified" and so made unavailable to the public, even under the Freedom of Information Act. The first George Bush selectively released favorable photos and information about the Gulf War, and his son has gone one step further in manufacturing evidence to take us into war in the Middle East. In the U.S., our government not only has hidden its errors, and its abuses of civil rights in its unconstitutional use of detainment and torture of prisoners, but it has encouraged this environment of secrecy in its lax regulation of corporations. As an example, the recent withdrawal of various drugs from the market because of increased risk of heart problems is only the tip of a policy in which drug companies routinely publish only the favorable studies of their products.

While I seem to have gotten a bit off the topic, I think its important to for us to be aware of our own faults as we decide what policies we should implement in regards to censorship in other countries. Perhaps if we had less to criticize in our own policies we could be more forceful in criticizing the even more egregious forms of censorship and violations of civil rights practiced in Asia and other countries around the world.[Edit by="sperez on Mar 22, 10:07:04 PM"][/Edit]

[Anonymous]

Although not always obvious, I think America does have a lot of censorship, espcially in the media that surrounds us. In the economics class I took last year, I learned that Time Warner owns a large percentage of companies and media including CNN, HBO, WB, Time Magazine, People Magazine, Sunset Magazine, AOL, Mapquest, New Line Cinema... you get the picture. With one big company owning so many sub-companies, it is easy for the companies views (political and otherwise) to affect what gets published in a vareity of subject matter. As a result, this could be a form of censorship, since big companies like Time Warner provide us our news and other information.

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