On Censorship and Self-Censorship
Introduction
A Herb Rotfeld note on threats to academic freedom
POSTING TYPE: Dialog
Posted by: Herbert Jack Rotfeld
Russell T Davies, UK writer of multiple widely-acclaimed US-popular television series, was presented with the award for Outstanding Contribution to Television at the recent BAFTA Awards ceremony. His acceptance speech was a warning about how new broadcast rules have forced writers to start censoring themselves to fit orders of compliance officers, what in US broadcast terminology is usually called Standards and Practices. The relevance of this to academic freedom when teaching marketing, advertising and (especially) public policy should be intuitively obvious, as well as important for the various marketing decisions of businesses. The following quotation from Davies’ speech is pulled from reporting at Bleeding Cool News, bleedingcool.com. The video is at
Herbert Jack Rotfeld the Forwarder
Russell T. Davies:
“When times get tough, TV gets timid. And you all know how hard it is to deal with compliance. And I’m not blaming the people in compliance; they work very hard and have a tough job to do. I do blame their bosses for getting scared. And I can feel it, I’ve literally had experience of this. The compliance is getting tough, ‘You can’t say this, you can’t say that, you have to balance it’. No, you don’t have to [expletive deleted] balance it, you can just be strong and say what you want. And I think then that is where censorship creeps in. The censorship isn’t the government, isn’t the authorities, it’s in us. We sit there and say, ‘Oh, they won’t like that. Oh, you can’t do that, you can’t say that.’ And then the worst form of censorship of all comes in at home.
“Where the writers – and I don’t just mean drama, I mean writers, whether in children’s or factual or documentaries, entertainment, where those creators sit there saying, ‘I can’t write that. They won’t like that, they won’t accept that, they won’t make that. And that is the worst form of censorship that exists because it censors an idea before it’s ever been shown to someone. So now, with the danger that’s coming towards us, indisputably coming towards us, we now need a world in which the BBC stands for ‘Big Balls Corporation’. We need an ITV that is literally ‘Independent Television’. We need a Channel 4 that is a channel for something. We need a Netflix that is ‘Not Enough Trans Films [words unclear]’ ….
“But we’ve seen in America what is happening, how the government is attacking the media. They’re literally attacking people and literally suing them, and we all know there are people who use that as a playbook. That is coming this way, that’s a fact. And television at its best, it’s a beacon. It’s a lighthouse, it’s an emergency flare, it’s a light in the dark, it is a torch bearer that stands for truth and insight and wisdom and justice. And we must not let that flame go out.”
HJR Afternote: If you aren’t a member, you might consider joining the American Association of University Professors. Why? I refer you to a short recording made over a decade ago that was presented at orientation of new Auburn University faculty. Those viewing applauded at the end, and maybe some of them joined. And the concerns pointed out back then are even more important for university faculty today.