----------
Not for the first time, I've been finding myself puzzled by the arbitrariness of censorship in the media this week. There are a couple of news stories that brought it on, really: the train crash in Spain, and the family in Winnipeg whose two children were possibly killed by their mother.
In the first case, there's both the news footage of horrific scene after the crash, and the (equally horrific) security camera footage of the actual crash as it happened. In any of the media outlets that I checked -- both internet and television -- both videos were shown with no censorship at all, and in the vast majority of cases with little or no warning that you "may find this disturbing". Seemed a bit odd, that, what with all the bloodied people and covered corpses, and the oh shit feeling in the pit of your stomach as you watch that train coming around the bend, knowing full well what's about to happen to it.
In the second story, the weirdness came about in the still pictures shown. When the story was first reported -- again, both on the internet and television -- there were several photos of the family published, partly with the aim of finding the mother. And when I say several photos of the family, I mean several photos of the entire family, with no censoring. The next day, though, I noticed that more than one television network was airing the photos with the father's face pixellated.
The next day.
Sort of a shutting the barn door after the horse is already gone, I figure.
Now, my problem with this is that it really does seem so arbitrary. I can certainly understand pixellating the man's face (Whomever knows that he should be allowed his privacy after the unfathomable thing that happened to him), but the day after? What good does that do anyone? And how do you suppose the families of those bloodied and dead people in Spain are dealing with the fact that the world has seen their loved ones splashed all over the news without any censorship?
It doesn't make sense. But then censorship rarely does.
Just to make my own position clear, I'm rarely for censorship. Oh, sure, there are things that I don't think should be out there -- like the footage of that murder that was put out on the "gore" site (another news story, sorry. The owner of the website recently tried to skip bail in Edmonton), but I think that most of what gets censored in our society is just one group's views loudly shouted over the rest of us.
Nudity's a good example. And I'm not talking porn, here; just nudity. Why is nudity such a big deal to so many people? We all have bodies, and deciding that those bodies are somehow filthy and need to be hidden from everyone is so very unhealthy. It creates body issues, for pity's sake. It creates titillation when there really doesn't need to be any. It creates the OMIGOD JANET JACKSON'S GOT A NIPPLE situation that most of the rest of the world was secretly laughing at the US about.
Censorship like that just gives people a wrong sense of what wrong is.
And don't get me started on the arbitrariness of language censorship in the media. I can't get into it as much as I'd like to because I need to get back to work, but since I've posted about language before and will likely do so again that's ok. What I will say, however, is that the situation in Canada is at least a little more reasonable than it is in the States, where Craig Ferguson isn't allowed to say tits. Tits, yes, and the man's show airs at 12:30 at night. And the same wrong-problem arises because of that stupid kind of censorship. Bleeping a word like tits just makes people think that he said something far, far worse. Again, it creates titillation out of a non-titillating scenario.
Maybe the censor-types out there just like to be titillated? Who knows? It'd be one explanation.
An arbitrary one, I suppose, but that would fit right in with most censorship.
Gotta get back to work now.
No comments:
Post a Comment