Recently in my city (Sydney, Australia) the media has featured a large amount of violent crime, along with calls for such things to be censored.
My concern is that the government will inflict extreme censorship austerity on all publishing, when writers publish angles, with which it does not agree. In the future it might do this to appease members of the public who are concerned about copycat internet fuelled violence.
Imagine if society had gone down this road more than 50 years ago.
We may not have heard the truth about Watergate in the Nixon administration or the leaks about the Khemlani loans affair, from Gough Whitlam's Australian government.
No problem. I agree we need to remove violence from the internet. In fact, I am appalled by many forms of violence. This includes many of the contact sports.
The latest campaign to rid the internet of violence is a good thing. The fear, however, is that governments will use this campaign to take away our right to know, as much as possible.
Unfortunately, new government legislations can supercede past documents. This means we will trash the rules and etiquette, we have come to rely upon as standard.
There was one example, which I have blogged about previously. This is the Community Radio Codes of Practice. This code managed to supercede the McLean report from the Whitlam government, in 1974. What was wrong with that? Well theses codes of practice discussed something very important, with which I agreed. This was ethics and political correctness. It however, trampled all over the McLean Report, through its emission of the very fabric of that report. The codes of practice ignored what the McLean Report demanded right throughout that document. This was that local communities needed and wanted a local service. The McLean Report demanded in section 3.6, that community services should provide alternative programming to commercial channels and the ABC. I fail to see this alternative on community radio, when it appears to mimic commercial radio and Triple J music presenters. As well as this, their Community Broadcasting Association of Australia sells them the copycat version of the ABC national news. Where is the news for their local catchment to whom they are licenced to broadcast? Where is their news for the metropolitan area of the city, in which they are located?
What has happened here is that they have used a new government legislation to completely replace what should be the general standards of community radio.
What will happen in the future of media censorship, is that they will use censorship legislation against violence, to prevent us from hearing about what our governments are doing in municipal affairs, state matters and national issues. That is my point. It's a bit like a precedent in a court of law. A court makes a landmark ruling on a case then that ruling applies to all other cases. I just hope that when they they change the censorship laws to stop violence, they don't hinder or even stop our right to know about the things we should see and hear on the media ― Joseph Walz
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