MEDIA AND CENSORSHIP
Government Censorship Protecting You from Reality

By: Lorraine Klein
(French Student of Ankara University)

What is Censorship

•      “Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.”

•      “Self-censorship: when an individual such as an author or other creator engages in censorship of their own works or speech”

•      All the medias concerned : press, TV, radio, cinema, Internet, music, literature….

Form of Censorship

•      Automatic filtering (key words)

•      Censors

•      Untouchable authorities (politicians, religious leaders…)

•      Taboos (social, religious…) (Morocco, Iran…)

•      “National security” (restrictions, dangers, threats…)

•      Budget cuts (loss of quality, impossibility of conducting background investigations…)

•      Intimidations, imprisonments, murders

•      Inadmissibility

•      Closures of medias (lack of media pluralism…)

•      Banning of some medias

Details We Should Pay Attention:

•      Relationship between journalists and politicians or CEOs

•      Self-censorship (ex: Turkey)

•      Lack of media pluralism

•      To whom belong the medias? (ex: France)

World Press Freedom Index:

•      ranks the performance of 180 countries according to:

-          media pluralism and independence

-          respect for the safety and freedom of journalists

-          the legislative, institutional and infrastructural environment in which the media operate.

Ranks on 180 countries:

•      France: rank 38

•      Indonesia: 138

•      Turkey: 149

An Interesting Case:

•      China the World’s worst jailer of the Press

•      The “Great Firewall of China”

•      30 journalists and 74 netizens (Sept 14)

•      The market of censorship

The Sensitive Issue of Freedom of Expression:

•      The right to freedom of expression is recognized as a human right under article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 

•      Charlie Hebdo

•      A will to filter out any hate speech: where is the limit (USA: fat hate speech // fact acceptance movement)

By: Unknown On 11:28 PM

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