MEDIA CENSORSHIP AND CONTRADICTIONS
Censorship of the media is a hotly contested topic. It has been discussed whether there should or should not be censorship of the media. Censorship is the cuts, remakes or blocking of some media pieces. It is usually used in order to remove obscene things or scenes from media; however, it is not used only these kind of media pieces. The areas that censorship is used are political contents, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, gender and sexuality, religious beliefs and violence, mainly. Censorship has been around people for a long time and it affects the society in many different aspects; it has an effect on the books people read, on the music people listen to, internet, television and many other aspects which are so important parts of people’s everyday lives. If it is thoroughly considered, it can be found out that there should not be censorship on media and it should not be imposed on people by government or by other powers because it contradicts with people’s freedom and with democracy.
The first thing I would like to consider is the fact that censorship breaks into pieces the freedom of speech, freedom of thought and intellectual freedom; it is an unnecessary violation of the right to view or listen what people choose. First of all, American Library Association describes intellectual freedom as the right of all people to search for and find information about any subject from different aspects and points of view (n.d., n.p.). Because of the fact that censored aspects of a topic are unreachable, censorship is an obstacle to people’s intellectual freedom. In other words, people can not reach all points of view on a topic because of censorship. In addition, Mill highlights that one of the most valuable freedom that people have is freedom of speech and it is even a par of human autonomy; he is certainly correct when he states that censorship interferes with that autonomy and this is unacceptable because...