Here's something that I've been thinking of writing a post about, ever since I started this blog. I haven't written about it yet. But given some of what's in the news about now, I think it's somewhat timely.
Back when I was in college, there was a push by Tipper Gore and some other politicians' wives to protect youth from obscene music. The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) wanted to have warning labels put on records that had potentially-offensive materials.
At the time, I was one of the editors of the campus newspaper. A few of my colleagues and I were in the paper's office arguing about the PMRC and its proposal. Was this an infringement 1A? Or simply a useful tool t help parents make educated parenting decisions?
Sadly, our debate degenerated into a shouting match over censorship. We went over and over the same ground, arguing about whether the labels and a government-imposed rating system for records counted as censorship. What saddens me (apart from the fact that we couldn't argue the issue without screaming at each other) is that, by focusing on whether the proposals amounted to censorship, we obfuscated the actual issue.
The debate became a question of how to define "censorship," with the implicit assumption that censorship is bad and whatever is not censorship is therefore not bad. Somehow, we didn't consider the possibilities that "censorship" could be defined broadly enough to include something that's not unacceptable, or that it could be defined narrowly enough to exclude something that is unacceptable. Effectively, we were fighting about semantics instead of the virtues of the issue at hand.
Right now, I'm trying to keep that in mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment