Dictionary:

censorship

  (sĕn'sər-shĭp')

1. The act, process, or practice of censoring.
2. The office or authority of a Roman censor.
3. Psychology. Prevention of disturbing or painful thoughts or feelings from reaching consciousness except in a disguised form.

Definition: forbiddance; ban
Antonyms: approval, compliment, encouragement, endorsement, praise, recommendation, sanction

Censorship is strictly the review by an authority of any material before publication or dissemination, with the legal right to prevent, alter, or delay its appearance. The term is often loosely used to reflect voluntary arrangements between armed forces and the media, or in criticism of any system other than complete press freedom. Historically, censorship has been habitually practised by most governments, or other political and religious authorities. Censorship in the military sense has only become an issue in modern times, with the growth of liberal or democratic governments, and new methods of press communication. Its problems arise from a collision between traditional press freedoms and the needs of military security in wartime. The USA has occupied a special place in this story, through being the world's first literate democracy, and also through the constitutional position of the press. Much censorship has been by co-operation, and it has not been unusual for the media to ask for guidance or even direct censorship from the armed forces, rather than reveal wartime secrets.

The profession of war correspondent developed in the mid-19th century with the growth of the telegraph and widespread newspaper readership. The first wars on which reporting probably had a direct impact were the Crimean and the American civil wars. In the next fifty years vague censorship regulations were established in most western countries, but only supplementing more important informal arrangements. The Second Boer War and the Russo-Japanese war convinced the British in particular that a more formal system was needed.

At the start of WW I all belligerents had extensive censorship legislation and practices, although military attempts to exclude the press altogether from reporting the fighting fronts proved unsuccessful. This war also saw the extension of censorship to servicemen's letters home. Comments in letters analysed by censors became a tool for commanders in judging their own side's morale. WW II saw a revival of similar censorship practices, again with significant co-operation from the press. But this only applied chiefly to wars of national survival, and to the era of newspaper dominance. The last significant case of legally enforceable wartime censorship by the USA or Britain was the Korean war.

The rise of radio and television to supplant newspapers in the second half of the 20th century raised a number of new issues. Controversial but highly critical claims that the unrestricted reporting of American involvement in the Vietnam war had contributed to defeat produced concern on all sides. The result was the introduction by the USA and Britain of voluntary systems of press restraint, seen in the Falklands and the Gulf wars. Since then, developments in media communications technology have made censorship increasingly unfeasible.

Bibliography

• Jowett, G. S., and O'Donnell, V., Propaganda and Persuasion (Newbury Park, 1992).
• Taylor, Philip M., Munitions of the Mind (London, 1990)

— Stephen Badsey

The Supreme Court has found censorship to be an especially intolerable restriction on freedom of expression. The term censorship might encompass almost any restriction on the dissemination or content of expression, but most fundamentally it means prior restraint—any government scheme for screening either who may speak or the content of what people wish to say before the utterance. Although the Court has never held prior restraint to be inherently unconstitutional, it has emphasized that “any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity” (Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan 1963, p. 70).

The Court first directly addressed the constitutionality of prior restraint in Near v. Minnesota (1931). In question was a Minnesota law that allowed judges to eliminate as a public nuisance any “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” newspaper or periodical (see Libel). A state court had declared a newspaper, the Saturday Press, to be a public nuisance after it had attacked public officials with allegations of corruption, laziness, and illicit contact with gangsters. Much of the material seemed anti‐Semitic. The state court issued an order forever prohibiting the editors “from producing, editing, publishing, circulating, having in their possession, selling or giving away any publication whatsoever which is a malicious, scandalous or defamatory newspaper” either under the title of the Saturday Press or any other title (p. 706). Violation of the order would constitute contempt of court.

By a margin of 5 to 4, the U.S. Supreme Court found the statute to be an unconstitutional form of censorship, because before a banned newspaper could publish again, the editors would have to satisfy a judge as to the new publication's good character. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes for the majority concluded that prior restraint would be constitutional only in extreme circumstances, for example, if a newspaper were about to publish the location of troops in wartime. Speaking for dissenters, Justice Pierce Butler protested that the Minnesota law did not constitute a classic form of censorship because the newspaper had published nine issues before being suppressed. He noted that the law “does not authorize administrative control in advance such as was formerly exercised by the licensers and censors” (p. 735).

In subsequent cases, the Court disapproved of administrative licensing of speech where the licenser can make decisions based on the context of the would‐be speaker's expression. For example, in Lovell v. Griffin (1938) the Court held unconstitutional an ordinance banning distribution of literature without permission of the city manager, where the manager had carte blanche to grant or deny permits. Likewise, the Court in Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1951) found unconstitutional a New York scheme under which exhibition licenses could be denied to motion pictures found to be “sacrilegious.” Nor would the Court allow the postmaster general to revoke Esquire magazine's second‐class mailing privileges on grounds that the publication was not contributing sufficiently to the public good and welfare (Hannegan v. Esquire, Inc., 1946). The Court struck down injunctions prohibiting newspapers from publishing articles based on the Pentagon Papers, classified documents that had been leaked to the press (New York Times Co. v. United States, 1971). And it held that judges could not prohibit journalists from publishing material potentially prejudicial to a criminal defendant when such material was obtained in open court (Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart, 1976).

On the other hand, the Court is likely to allow licensing systems that minimize administrative discretion, regulate the time, place, and manner of expression without regard to its content, and are guided by clear and specific standards (Cox v. New Hampshire, 1941; Poulos v. New Hampshire, 1953). The Court has allowed government censorship of obscene movies, but only if stringent procedures are followed, including prompt judicial review (Freedman v. Maryland, 1965). The Court has also granted public elementary and secondary schools broad power to censor student publications (Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 1988). It has also concluded that the federal government has broad power to require many government employees to submit to censorship of their speech and writing even after they leave government employment and even when unclassified material is involved (Snepp v. United States, 1980). Further, the Court has held that people who disobey court orders restraining expression may be punished for contempt even if the restriction is likely to be found unconstitutional (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 1967).

The Near decision itself has been invoked to justify prior restraint, which has led critics to complain that the Court has provided no clear theory or standards for determining when prior restraint is permissible. In the Pentagon Papers Case, justices on both sides of the decision used Near to support their positions—some for the proposition that prior restraint is presumptively unconstitutional, but others for the proposition that exceptional circumstances can justify prior restraint. And when, in 1979, a federal district court issued an injunction prohibiting The Progressive magazine from publishing an article purporting to explain how to build a hydrogen bomb, the judge concluded that the article was analogous to the types of exceptional circumstances listed in Near (United States v. The Progressive). (The injunction was lifted after similar material was published elsewhere and the government dropped the case.)

In recent years, spirited scholarly debate has arisen over the question of whether the evil of prior restraint might be overstated. Some have argued that judicially imposed restraints are less serious than administrative censorship, that freedom of expression may be served better by the use of prior restraint than by severely punishing expression after the fact. Fear of severe subsequent punishment, they assert, may have a far greater “chilling effect” on speech than narrowly focused, judicially supervised prior restraint.

The Supreme Court appears thus far not to have been swayed by such argument. It appears to remain committed to the view that censorship, whether imposed by administrators or by judges, is presumptively unconstitutional and the most deplorable way of restricting freedom of expression.

See also First Amendment; Speech and the Press.

Bibliography

• Near v. Minnesota, 50th Anniversary, symposium in Minnesota Law Review 66 (1981):1–208.
• Martin H. Redish, The Proper Role of the Prior Restraint Doctrine in First Amendment Theory, Virginia Law Review 70 (1984): 53–100

— Robert E. Drechsel

n. the practice of officially examining books, films, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

For more information on censorship, visit Britannica.com.

Censorship informally began in Russia when the regime acquired the realm's first printing press about 1560, a century after the invention of movable type. From then until the late 1600s successive tsars confined the use of that press, and the few more imported, to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Peter I (r. 1682 - 1725) expanded his government's monopoly to include secular publishing when, in 1702, he founded Russia's first newspaper The St. Petersburg Bulletin to promote himself and his programs. In 1720, having added the Senate and Academy of Sciences as official publishers, he required the ecclesiastical college to approve in advance every book printed in Russia, a censorship role that he passed the next year to the newlycreated Holy Synod. Synod authority over secular publishing ended in 1750 when Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741 - 1762) gave the Academy of Sciences the right to censor its publications, as she did Moscow University at its founding in 1755.

When Catherine II (r. 1762 - 1796) finally made private ownership and use of printing presses legal in 1783, her decree governing "free publishing" banned published words against "the laws of God and the state" or of a "clearly-seditious" nature. The police would henceforth supervise "free" presses and serve as preliminary censors. Alarmed by the French Revolution, Catherine ended her reign by closing private presses and by opening new censorship offices in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Still, Catherine's reign marked a stage in widening limits on the publishing of periodicals and books in Russia.

Sharing Catherine II's early belief in private publishing, Alexander I (r. 1801 - 1825) reinstated private presses, along with a preliminary censorship system. He set its rules in 1804 in Russia's first, brief censorship statute, a major reform designed to make the exercise of state power more predictable and rational. Napoleon's invasion in 1812, however, caused Alexander I to tighten censorship and to embrace the intense religiosity that spread during the war. Because the tsar resumed peacetime rule as a religious mystic, his choice to head his new Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Education in 1817 was the president of the Russian Bible Society, A. N. Golitsyn, a zealot who used his role as chief censor to promote his religious views and to disseminate Bibles. Repeated complaints from high officials of the Russian Orthodox Church persuaded the Emperor to dismiss Golitsyn in 1824, the year before Alexander I died.

At the very outset of his reign, Nicholas I (r. 1825 - 1855) had to put down the Decembrist revolt led by gentry liberals. Blaming alien Western beliefs for discontent, the new tsar resolved to permeate society with Russian ideals and to prove, through paternalistic rule and controlled publishing that autocracy itself was inherently right for Russia.

Nicholas I in June 1826 issued his secular censorship law of June 1826 as a means to "direct public opinion into agreeing with present political circumstances and the views of the government." No less than 230 articles (five times the forty-six in the 1804 law) detailed procedures and made the author, not the censor, responsible should a duly censored text prove unacceptable once published (reversing the 1804 law).

Bowing to criticism among his officials, Nicholas named a new drafting committee and signed a substantially more liberal, but still sweeping, law of April 1828 to govern all works of "Literature, Science, and Art" (under it, responsibility again fell on the approving censor). A Foreign Censorship Committee had to publish monthly a list of the foreign works it had banned. Issued at the same time was a new ecclesiastical censorship statute that confirmed the Holy Synod's right - through censors chosen from ecclesiastical academies - to ban any book, work of art, ceremony, musical composition, or performance contrary to precepts of the Orthodox Church.

Nicholas also made censors of his new political police, the Third Section. To counter clandestine printing of illegal works and lax censorship of legal ones, he secretly ordered his special police to look for and report anything "inclined to the spread of atheism or which reflects in the artist or writer violations of the obligations of loyal subjects." One year after the French and Belgian Revolutions of 1830, Nicholas I put down the Polish rebellion. Building on popular support, the tsar in 1833 prescribed a system of ideas - so-called "Official Nationality" - to guide his subjects and his officials, including censors.

With respect to the state's granting licenses for private periodicals, the tsar himself approved or rejected applications, with the result that the mere forty-two private periodicals that circulated in 1825 had, by 1841, modestly increased to sixty. (Small readerships also forced a number of licensed periodicals to close for lack of profits.) As for books, limited statistics that begin with 1837 show that secular censors in that year approved more titles (838) than in 1845 (804) and 1846 (810), such numbers being minuscule compared to book production in Europe.

Although limits on publishing under Nicholas I from 1825 to 1855 were the most invasive in Imperial history, brilliant writers such as Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy won censors' approval under Nicholas I.

Assuming power in the last stages of the humiliating Crimean War, Alexander II (r. 1855 - 1881) blamed that debacle on Russia's backwardness and the archaic enserfment of 40 million peasants. To promote their liberation, in 1857 he lifted the de facto ban on publishing proposals for liberation.

On the heels of decreeing Emancipation in February 1861, Alexander II committed to reform of censorship and thirteen months later in March, 1862, ended preliminary censorship for all scientific, academic, and official publications. Then followed, five months after the 1864 judicial reform, the decree of April 6, 1865 to give "relief and convenience to the national press." Included as transitional for uncensored publications was a system of warnings that could lead to suspensions and closures for any showing a "dangerous orientation." Freed from censorship - but only in St. Petersburg and Moscow - were all periodicals, translated books of 320 pages or more, and original books of 160 pages or more. (Short books were not freed, given their greater potential to do harm.) A big change was the statute's subjecting to judicial prosecution anyone responsible for criminal content in a freed publication.

In December 1866, the State Council declared that full freedom to publish would "take shape under the influence of a series of judicial decisions." During the next decade, as mounting terrorism made the tsar wary of public opinion, the government all but abandoned press-related trials. New measures against the press included profit-cutting limits on street sales and commercial advertisements. Whereas officials used the warning system from 1865 through 1869 to suspend merely ten freed periodicals, they suspended twenty-seven from 1875 through 1879. On the other hand, the number of active journals rose from twelve in 1865 to twenty in 1879; of newspapers, from forty-one in 1865 to sixty-two in 1879.

That trend reversed after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, because Alexander III (r. 1881 - 1894) repressed publishing. As one means, he created a Supreme Commission on Press Affairs in 1882 to silence not just "dangerous" periodicals but also, through temporary banishment from journalism, their editors and publishers. The Commission imposed closure, its harshest penalty, seven times from 1881 to 1889 - a period when the overall number of journals and newspapers declined just over 22 and 11 percentage points, respectively.

Given the seeming containment of terrorism by 1890, an easing of restrictions let the number of journals and newspapers rise; and the total stood once more at the 1881 level when Nicholas II (r. 1894 - 1917) acceded to the throne. Ten years later, during the 1905 Revolution, civil disobedience in printing plants effectively ended state controls that included censorship. In October, following a government decree that no printing plant could operate if it bypassed press regulations, the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workmen's Deputies ordered members of the Printers' Union to refuse to work for plant owners who complied.

Not only did Nicholas II issue his Manifesto of October 17, 1905 to promise imminent freedom of expression and other reforms, but he also ordered his new prime minister, Sergei I. Witte, to draft legislation to effect such changes. New rules for periodicals resulted on November 24, 1905. In issuing them, the tsar claimed to have shifted wholly to judicial controls and thereby to have granted "one of the fundamental freedoms." Promised new rules on book publishing took effect on April 26, 1906, and they allowed most books simultaneously to reach the public and the governing Committee on Press Affairs. Excepted were works of fewer than seventeen pages (censors had to approve them at least two days before publication), and those from seventeen to eighty pages (censors had to screen them a week in advance). The new rules let officials close an indicted publication pending what could be protracted adjudication.

Book-related trials in the remainder of 1906 mounted to an all-time high of 223, with 175 convictions. Those persons found criminally responsible for circulating or attempting to circulate a work ruled illegal mainly suffered fines, not imprisonment; for the main aim of the government was judicially to identify criminal content and to keep it from the public. Because the publishing industry became so large in the next decade, the tsarist regime found it almost impossible to limit printed opinion. By 1914, Russian citizens enjoyed freedom of expression very nearly equal to Western levels.

War with the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires in 1914 caused the tsar to impose military censorship on private publishing. Then followed the heightening domestic turmoil that culminated in the 1917 revolution, ending Imperial Russia and a relatively free press; for Lenin and his Bolsheviks, who seized power in November, so well knew the power of the printed word that they eliminated privately-controlled publishing companies. Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American novelist and memoirist, provides a measure of the change in this summation: "Under the Tsars (despite the inept and barbarous character of their rule) a freedom-loving Russian had incomparably more possibility and means of expressing himself than at any time during Vladimir Lenin's and Josef Stalin's regime. He was protected by law. There were fearless and independent judges in Russia." Following Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin bested all rivals to emerge as the leader of the Party by the next year. Under him in 1936, the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics made clear that publishing was to achieve the objectives of the socialist order as determined by the Communist Party. Harsh penalties awaited violators of laws against "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda."

Enforcing limits on the printed word - and all cultural and artistic expression - was maintained by means of a vast censorship apparatus known as Glavlit (the Chief Administration for the Protection of State Secrets) and only official institutions published newspapers (e.g., the Communist Party published Pravda). Each publishing house answered to the State Committee for Publishing, Printing, and the Book Trade. Party authorities approved all editors and publishers of newspapers, magazines, and journals.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev began his eight-year dominance (1956 - 1964) as first secretary, and his effort to "de-Stalinize" the USSR brought his famous but short-lived "thaw" in censorship, especially with respect to literary and scholarly journals and the newspaper Izvestiia. Direct criticisms of the founding principles of the state or of system of government remained illegal, however, until 1986 when Mikhail S. Gorbachev, as general secretary, liberalized publishing practices under the term glasnost.

Bibliography

Balmuth, Daniel. (1979). Censorship in Russia, 1865 - 1905. Washington, DC: University Press of America.

Choldin, Marianna Tax, and Friedberg, Maurice, eds. (1989). The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars and Censors in the USSR, tr. Maurice Friedberg and Barbara Dash. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Foote, I. P. (1994). "Counter-Censorship: Authors v. Censors in 19th Century Russia," Oxford Slavonic Papers 27 62-105.

Foote, I. P. (1994). "In the Belly of the Whale: Russian Writers and the Censorship in the Nineteenth Century," Slavonic and East European Review 98 (1990), 294 - 298.

Papmehl, K. A. (1971). Freedom of Expression in Eighteenth Century Russia. The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff.

Ruud, Charles A. (1982). Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804 - 1906. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

—CHARLES A. RUUD

The term censorship in everyday language connotes ideas of blame and repression of faults. This is how it appears in Freud in Studies on Hysteria: "we are very often astonished," he writes, "to realize in what a mutilated state all the ideas and scenes emerged which we extracted from the patient by procedure of pressing. Precisely the essential elements of the picture were missing [...] I will give one or two examples of the way in which a censoring of this kind operates . . ." (1895b, p. 281-282). He then shows that what is censored is what appears to the patient to be blameworthy, shameful, and inadmissible. In a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss (December 22, 1897, in 1950a) he compares this psychic work to the censorship that the czarist regime imposed on Russian newspapers at the time: "Words, sentences and whole paragraphs are blacked out, with the result that the remainder is unintelligible" (1950a, p. 240).

Although the term appears quite frequently in writings from this first period, its status remains uncertain. Freud seems to be describing the deliberate suppression by patients, in their communication with the doctor, of what they do not wish to reveal to him, as well as the mechanism and effects of unconscious repression (1896b). A second meaning appears when he evokes the censorship which, in dream-work, results in a manifest text being presented as a riddle (Interpretation of Dreams, 1900a).

The metapsychological texts of 1915 elaborate on the distinctions outlined in chapter seven of the Interpretation of Dreams. Censorship is in fact defined as that which opposes the return of that which is repressed, at the two successive levels in the passage from the unconscious to the preconscious (the "antechamber") and on to the conscious (the "drawing-room") (1915e).

Censorship is thus clearly distinguished from repression: whereas repression rejects a representation and/or an affect into the unconscious, censorship is what prevents it from re-emerging. Freud nevertheless confuses this distinction later when he writes, for example: "We know the self-observing agency as the ego-censor, the conscience; it is this that exercises the dream-censorship during the night, from which the repressions of inadmissible wishful impulses proceed" (1916-17a, p. 429). With the introduction of the structural theory Freud made a new distinction, with the ego becoming the agent of the censorship under the superego—the merciless supervisor (1923b).

Although the notion of censorship continues to be fairly widely used in psychoanalysis to describe resistance to the treatment, it has scarcely received any further elaboration and its global nature may cause it to appear to be somewhat outmoded.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1895b). On the grounds for detaching a particular syndrome from neurasthenia under the description "anxiety neurosis." SE, 3: 85-115.

——. (1896b). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence. SE, 3: 157-185.

——. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4-5.

——. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.

——. (1916-1917a). Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Parts I & II. SE, 15-16.

——. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 1-66.

——. (1950a). Extracts from the Fliess papers. SE, 1: 173-280.

—ROGER PERRON

Censorship began in the sixteenth century as the effort to prohibit religious ideas that were deemed heretical. From the beginning religious censorship was only possible when civil governments agreed that it was needed and provided the police authority for enforcement. In the following two centuries the state gradually took complete control, with little or no participation by clergymen. The effectiveness of censorship waxed and waned according to the perceived threat of alleged heretical, seditious, or immoral books as well as local circumstances. Censorship was strongest during the sixteenth century when Catholic and Protestant states sought to enforce religious uniformity, and weakest during the antireligious and politically liberal Enlightenment era of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, censorship of books, speech, and theater never completely disappeared because almost all state and church authorities felt that it was a legitimate and necessary means of protecting the populace from destructive ideas.

The Protestant Reformation

Little censorship existed before the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation. Civil governments did not permit overt political criticism within the state, but they could do little about denunciations from beyond their borders. Because there was widespread agreement about the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, little censorship of religious and philosophical ideas existed.

The outbreak of the Protestant Reformation stimulated the beginning of religious censorship. Since Protestants promulgated their views through the printing press, and Catholics replied via the same medium, it was inevitable that both sides would try to control the press. But they waited until all hope of reconciliation ended in the middle of the sixteenth century before establishing censorship machinery. Then both sides developed similar policies.

Press censorship needed three components to be effective. First, an individual or a group had to determine which books, authors, and ideas were dangerous—a commission of experts had to prepare a list of objectionable previously published books. Second, prepublication censorship was needed to ensure that new books propagating heretical, seditious, or immoral ideas would not be published. Governments had to establish committees of readers, composed of clergymen and civil officials, to review manuscripts before issuing permissions to print. Prepublication censorship would become the most widespread and effective kind of censorship. Third, the civil authority used its police powers to keep banned books from entering the state and, if possible, to remove them from bookstores and libraries. This part of censorship was never very effective.

The papacy fulfilled the first requirement by promulgating a series of Indexes of Prohibited Books, the most important of which were the Tridentine Index of 1564, so called because the Council of Trent authorized it, and its successor, the Clementine Index of 1596, promulgated by Pope Clement VIII. Additional indexes followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at widely scattered intervals. Indexes listed authors and titles that could not be printed, read, or held, plus rules to guide those carrying out prepublication censorship and expurgation (elimination of objectionable passages in books otherwise acceptable). Catholic state and church authorities cooperated relatively effectively in censorship actions despite numerous disagreements and jurisdictional conflicts. For example, France never accepted the papal indexes but still banned Protestant books and ideas.

Protestant censorship followed the same paths except that no supranational Protestant church existed to direct and coordinate censorship. Since Protestant religious leaders invested the state with substantial authority over the church, the state assumed the leading role in censorship. Each Protestant state had to decide which books to ban and how to censor. Protestant states banned the publication, importation, and ownership of Catholic works, and sometimes the works of other Protestants. They also condemned books considered immoral and critical of the government. Although Protestant censorship has been little studied, it is likely that England and the Calvinist canton of Geneva had the most effective Protestant censorship in the sixteenth century.

Both Catholic and Protestant churches and states regulated what was preached in the pulpit and taught in universities. Prepublication censors sometimes dictated that scholars accept unwelcome changes in their works. Authors exercised some degree of self-censorship. A few scholars in both Catholic and Protestant worlds lost university positions, or suffered worse, because of their religious views. Political censorship also intensified in the late sixteenth century as governments attempted to stem a flood of vitriolic anonymous political pamphlets criticizing rulers and supporting rebellion, especially in France.

State Censorship

Although censorship began as a result of the religious division of Europe, civil governments quickly took complete control of censorship of books and theater. France is a good example. Beginning in the 1530s the monarchy issued a series of decrees that sought to ban Protestant literature. By the early seventeenth century a multiplicity of censors existed. Hence, in 1672 the monarchy established a college of censors, a group of scholars appointed to read manuscripts intended for publication and to grant the publisher the right to print the book, called a privilège. By the eighteenth century the number of French censors ranged from 150 to 200. The college exercised prepublication censorship and awarded exclusive publication rights to one publisher, thus protecting him from piracy by others.

English censorship of printed works began when Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547) sought to protect the national church from other doctrines and his monarchy from attacks. Succeeding monarchs used censorship to enforce different religious establishments. Edward VI (ruled 1547–1553) allowed Protestant works, while Mary Tudor (ruled 1553–1558) banned them. Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) passed numerous laws censoring the press and the theater to ensure that they respected her version of the English Church, did not publish Catholic views, and did not criticize the monarchy. In 1557 the crown created the Stationers' Company to issue licenses to print. The requirement that every book had to be licensed helped control the press. English monarchs continued a policy of state censorship over the next two centuries, although the purpose of censorship increasingly became that of shielding the monarchy from any criticism. Nevertheless, the shifting policies of the crown toward the national church, Puritanism, and Catholicism produced considerable variation from regime to regime in the seventeenth century, resulting in less effective censorship. Publishers of obscene, seditious, and blasphemous matter simply published without permission. So in 1695 England and Wales ended pre-publication censorship of written materials. The practice of locating and destroying books and prosecuting publishers had always been difficult, and that also waned, but censorship of the stage remained.

Every other large and small political unit had similar censorship systems, sometimes including representatives of the local church. But the local nature of censorship, limited to the boundaries of the state or city, was its weakness. Authors and printers wishing to publish political or religious criticism only needed to go to the next state to publish their works. Then the international commercial network of the book trade, including book fairs at Frankfurt and elsewhere, distributed the books throughout Europe. Finally, newspapers in the late seventeenth century created a new publication that was difficult to censor. Because newspapers were local and ephemeral, any censorship had to be quick and local. The censorship machinery of the sixteenth century was organized to censor learned works of religion, philosophy, and politics and could not adapt easily to newspapers, plus broadsides and other ephemeral matter, which were printed overnight on cheap paper, often without the names of author and printer, and were quickly distributed.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, especially in the years from 1750 to 1789, significantly weakened but did not eliminate censorship. Many Enlightenment philosophes deplored it, especially religious censorship, partly because they wrote many antireligious works. Rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786), Empress Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–1780) and Joseph II (Holy Roman emperor, 1765–1790; king of Austria, 1780–1790), Empress Catherine II of Russia (ruled 1762–1796), and King Charles III of Spain (ruled 1759–1788), who were influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, permitted more religious and literary freedom of expression. However, when writers began to publish works criticizing absolutist government and demanding expanded political rights for citizens, the rulers again tightened censorship. But they did not, and could not, return censorship to its earlier state.

In France, Enlightenment pressures seriously weakened the privilège system, as censors permitted the publication of ideas that had previously been banned. Numerous publishers in smaller states just beyond the borders of France published many works without privilèges, then sent them into France. The loosening of censorship permitted an avalanche of political pamphlets critical of the monarchy and the church, which helped bring on the French Revolution.

Bibliography

Primary Source

Index des livres interdits. Edited by J. M. De Bujanda et al. 10 vols. Sherbrooke, Quebec, and Geneva, Switzerland, 1985–1996. Texts and history of the drafting and promulgation of all sixteenth-century indexes of prohibited books.

Secondary Sources

Clegg, Cyndia Susan. Press Censorship in Elizabethan England. Cambridge, U.K., 1997.

Eisenhardt, Ulrich. Die kaiserliche Aufsicht über Buchdruck, Buchhandel, und Presse im Heiligen Römischen Reich Deutscher Nation (1496–1806). Karlsruhe, 1970. Censorship in the Holy Roman Empire.

Grendler, Paul F. The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605. Princeton, 1977. Book censorship in the major Italian publishing center.

Jones, Derek, ed. Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. 4 vols. London and Chicago, 2001. Fundamental; see articles on censorship in different countries, Enlightenment, and other topics.

Santschi, Catherine. La censure à Genève au XVIIe siècle. Geneva, 1978.

—PAUL F. GRENDLER

The suppression or proscription of speech or writing that is deemed obscene, indecent, or unduly controversial.

When a government agency prohibits such speech or writing, the party being censored frequently raises the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and press.

The term censorship derives from the official duties of the Roman censor who, beginning in 443 b.c., conducted the census by counting, assessing, and evaluating the populace. Originally neutral in tone, the term has come to mean the suppression of ideas or images by the government or others with authority.

Throughout history, societies practiced various forms of censorship in the belief that the community, as represented by the government, was responsible for molding the individual. For example, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato advocated various degrees of censorship in The Republic; the content of important texts and the dissemination of knowledge were tightly controlled in ancient Chinese society as is much information in modern China; and for centuries the Roman Catholic Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum proscribed much literature as contrary to the church's teachings.

The English-speaking world began wrestling with issues of censorship in the seventeenth century. In his Areopagitica (1644) John Milton argued in favor of the right to publish, free from government restraint. In the United States the First Amendment to the Constitution (1787) guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

The history and culture of the United States emphasize individual rights and demonstrate a wariness of governmental attempts to censor. Censorship in this country tests the First Amendment rights of individuals to communicate freely against the government's interests in curbing certain communications that it perceives as harmful to itself or the public.

Abortion

In some cases, the government can constitutionally censor the speech of those who receive federal funding. For example, the Supreme Court ruled in Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U.S. 173, 111 S. Ct. 1759, 114 L. Ed. 2d 233 (1991), that, without restricting First Amendment rights, the government can ban abortion counseling in federally funded health clinics.

Prisoners' Mail

If the government's interest is penological it also has broader rights to censor speech. Prisoners' outgoing mail can be censored in order to thwart escape plans, shield the recipients from obscene or menacing letters, or circumvent inaccurate or adverse reports about prison conditions. Under the Supreme Court ruling in Procunier v. Martinez, 416 U.S. 396, 94 S. Ct. 1800, 40 L. Ed. 2d 224 (1974), prison administrators can censor prisoners' personal correspondence only if it is necessary to maintain security, order, or rehabilitation efforts. Such censorship can be neither random nor excessively troublesome.

Entertainment

Perhaps the most visible form of censorship is that affecting the entertainment industry. Theater and film, as types of public entertainment, affect the common interest and can hence be subjected to certain types of governmental regulation. But attempts to regulate or censor often risk obstructing the free speech rights of playwrights, screenwriters, filmmakers, performers, and distributors.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that it is lawful to censor obscene entertainment to safeguard children from pornography and to protect adults from unknowingly or involuntarily viewing indecent materials (Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629, 88 S. Ct. 1274, 20 L. Ed. 2d 195 [1968]). Although Supreme Court interpretation permits individuals to view obscenity in the privacy of their homes (Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 89 S. Ct. 1243, 22 L. Ed. 2d 542 [1969]), theaters and movie houses are public places and therefore subject to regulation (Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, 413 U.S. 49, 93 S. Ct. 2628, 37 L. Ed. 2d 446 [1973]). The difficulty with such censorship is in trying to determine what is "obscene."

In Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S. Ct. 2607, 37 L. Ed. 2d 419 (1973), the Supreme Court concluded that a work is obscene and can be regulated if it appeals to a viewer's prurient interest; portrays sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. The Court further ruled that interpretations of this definition may vary across the United States and that communities may apply their own local standards to determine obscenity.

To avoid government censorship, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) regulates itself through a voluntary rating system. The system does not have statutory authority but is used to help the industry conform with statutes designed to protect children. Recognizing a 1968 Supreme Court decision that favored limited censorship for minors (Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629, 88 S. Ct. 1274, 20 L. Ed. 2d 195), the MPAA has devised a rating system based on the viewer's age. A G rating signals subject matter suitable for general audiences; PG stands for Parental Guidance Suggested; PG-13 strongly advises guidance for children under age thirteen because of possibly inappropriate material; R requires accompaniment by an adult for children under age seventeen, or eighteen in some states; and NC-17 or X prohibit anyone under age seventeen, or eighteen in some states, from entering the theater.

Radio and television have also met with governmental pressure to control the content of their broadcasts. Spurred on by the belief that violence on television adversely affects children's behavior and attitudes, Congress has attempted several times to encourage the media to adopt voluntary guidelines in the hope that less violence on television will lead to a less violent society. Although none of Congress's acts have been deemed outright censorship, government intrusion into broadcasting to discourage certain types of speech has not been welcomed by all. The various pieces of legislation raise questions about media self-censorship and the role of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in regulating freedom of expression.

In response to congressional pressure the National Association of Broadcasters adopted the Family Viewing Policy in 1974 to limit the first hour of prime-time programming to material suitable for families. The policy was found unconstitutional in 1976 (Writers Guild of America, West, Inc. v. F.C.C., 423 F. Supp. 1064 [C.D. Cal., 1976]).

Congress addressed the content of children's television with the Children's Television Act of 1990 (47 U.S.C.A. §§ 303a-303b [Supp. III 1991]), which limits the amount of advertising on children's television and compels broadcasters to air educational programs. Failure to comply with the act could jeopardize renewal of a station's license. Critics point out that the act has not improved children's programming because of its vague standards and the FCC's disinclination to enforce it.

The Television Violence Act (47 U.S.C.A. § 303c [Supp. III 1991]), proposed in 1986 by Senator Paul Simon (D-Ill.), was signed into law by President George Bush in December 1990. This act, which expired in 1993, was intended to prompt the networks, cable industry, and independent stations to decrease the amount of violence shown on television. Although it did not constitute direct government regulation, the act was criticized as a governmental attempt to impose its values on society by discouraging, if not suppressing, unpopular ideas.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996, 110 Stat. 56, requires television manufacturers to create a chip, known as the V-chip, which will allow parents to block out violent programs. The chip is to operate in conjuction with a rating system implemented by TV broadcasters that rates programs for violent and sexual content.

Radio broadcasts have also come under scrutiny. In FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726, 98 S. Ct. 3026, 57 L. Ed. 2d 1073 (1978), the Supreme Court ruled that a daytime broadcast of George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" monologue violated the prohibition of indecency in 18 U.S.C.A. § 1464 (1948) and was therefore subject to regulation. To many, this ruling gave the FCC further authority to censor speech and dictate values.

Music

Just as the entertainment industry has faced regulation or censorship for allegedly violent, obscene, or indecent material, so has the recording industry. Claiming that some popular music erodes morals by encouraging violence, drug abuse, and sexual promiscuity, the Parents' Music Resource Center, founded in 1985 by Tipper Gore, the wife of the future vice president, Albert Gore, Jr., successfully lobbied the music industry to place warning labels on records that may feature lyrics inappropriate for children.

Concerned about the rising rate of violent crime against law enforcement officers, the assistant director of public affairs for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) sent a letter in August 1989 to Priority Records to protest a rap group's lyrics. N.W.A., a Los Angeles-based rap group, recorded on its album Straight Outta Compton the song "Fuck tha Police," which violently protested police brutality. Although the letter from the FBI was a protest, not an attempt at regulation, many in the music industry interpreted it as an example of indirect censorship through intimidation.

Perhaps the most famous legal proceedings to censor music involved the rap group 2 Live Crew. In early 1990, a Florida circuit judge banned all sales of the group's album As Nasty As They Wanna Be on the grounds that the lyrics of several of its songs, including "Me So Horny," violated community standards for obscenity. The group brought suit to have the ban lifted in Skyywalker Records v. Navarro, 742 F. Supp. 638 (S.D. Fla. 1990), but the judge upheld the obscenity ruling. A black record store owner was arrested for continuing to sell the album and two members of 2 Live Crew were arrested on obscenity charges after a performance. The band members were acquitted of all charges in October 1990 but the debate continues between those demanding free expression in music and those seeking to censor allegedly obscene material.

Art

For almost as long as artists have been creating art, governments have both supported and censored artists' work. Ancient Athens, the Roman Empire, and the medieval Catholic Church financed many projects, whereas totalitarian regimes, for example, banned many works and repressed artists. The U.S. Congress was reluctant to fund art that might subsequently be construed as national art, or as government-approved art until 1960s activism encouraged it to do so. In 1965 the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities was established to foster excellence in the arts by providing stipends to deserving artists.

Controversy over the role of government support of the arts arose in the late 1980s with two artists who received NEA funding. In 1988 the photographer Andres Serrano received harsh condemnation for his photograph titled Piss Christ which depicted a plastic crucifix floating in a jar of Serrano's urine. Numerous senators sent letters of protest to the NEA, insisting that the agency cease underwriting vulgar art. A second furor arose in 1989 over the work of another photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, who received NEA support for his work, which depicted flowers, nude children, and homosexuality and sadomasochism.

Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) argued the most vociferously against the NEA's choices and introduced legislation to ban funding of "obscene or indecent art" (1989 H.R. 2788 [codified at 20 U.S.C.A. § 953 et seq. (1989)]). The Helms Amendment, adopted in October 1989, gave the NEA great power and latitude to define obscenity and quash alternative artistic visions. To enforce the new amendment, the NEA established an "obscenity pledge," which required artists to promise they would not use government money to create works of an obscene nature. The art world strongly resisted this measure: many museum directors resigned in protest and several well-known artists returned their NEA grants.

Two important cases tested the power of the NEA to censor artistic production. In Bella Lewitsky Dance Foundation v. Frohnmayer, 754 F. Supp. 774 (C.D. Cal. 1991), a dance company refused to sign the obscenity pledge and sued on the ground that the pledge was unconstitutional. A California district court agreed that the pledge violated the First Amendment right to free speech and that its vagueness denied the dance company due process under the Fifth Amendment.

In New School v. Frohnmayer, No. 90-3510 (S.D.N.Y. 1990), the New School for Social Research, in New York City, turned down a grant, claiming that the obscenity pledge acted as prior restraint and therefore breached the school's First Amendment rights. Before the constitutionality of the prior restraint argument was decided the NEA released the school from its obligation to sign the pledge.

The NEA abolished the obscenity pledge in November 1990, but in its place instituted a "decency clause" (1990 Amendments, Pub. L. No. 101-512, § 103(b), 104 Stat. 1963 [codified at 20 U.S.C.A. § 954(d)(1990)]), which required award recipients to ensure that their works met certain standards of decency. Failure to comply with this demand could mean suspension of grant payments.

Again the art world protested. In Finley v. NEA, 795 F. Supp. 1457 (C.D. Cal. 1992), artists known as the NEA Four — Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller— sued the NEA over the decency clause. A California district court agreed with the artists. The Finley court held that the decency clause, like the obscenity pledge, was unconstitutional because its vagueness denied the artists the due process guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment and because its too-general restriction suppressed speech.

Books

U.S. parents send their children to public schools to receive an education and to learn the fundamental values on which their democratic society is based. Conflict ensues when parents believe that certain schoolbooks contain material that is objectionable on political, moral, or religious grounds and should be banned in order to protect their children from exposure to allegedly harmful ideas. In some instances school boards have responded by physically removing books from school library shelves. In one 1982 study that polled 860 school librarians, 34 percent reported parental or community protests to books. In general, advocates of book banning maintain that censorship is warranted to redress social ills, whereas critics believe that freedom of speech is more important and useful to society than is imposing values through censorship.

Book banning as a way to remedy social problems was first tested by the Supreme Court in Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853, 102 S. Ct. 2799, 73 L. Ed. 2d 435 (1982). In Pico parents objected to nine books in the high school library, most of which were subsequently removed by the school board. The nine books were Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris; Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas; Best Short Stories of Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes; Laughing Boy, by Oliver LaFarge; Black Boy, by Richard Wright; A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich, by Alice Childress; Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver; and Go Ask Alice, by an anonymous author.

Pico debated the authority of local school boards to censor material in the interest of protecting students. The case reached the Supreme Court because lower courts were unable to devise standards for testing the constitutionality of book removal. The Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for public school boards to abridge students' First Amendment rights by banning books. Although school boards have the power to determine which books should sit on library shelves, they do not have the authority to censor.

Books published by commercial presses for sale to the general public sometimes meet with harsh condemnation and subsequent action that could be tantamount to censorship. In November 1990, Simon and Schuster canceled its contract with author Bret E. Ellis to publish his novel American Psycho, citing the work's graphic violence and sexual brutality. The National Writers Union decried the cancellation as contrary to free speech and artistic expression and as censorship. The publishing house defended its editorial judgment by claiming it did not want to put its imprint on a book of questionable taste and value. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, soon acquired the novel, and published it in March 1991.

Students' Speech

Students' free speech rights sometimes clash with schools' interest in maintaining control of public education. Students' First Amendment liberties were affirmed by the landmark Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503, 89 S. Ct. 733, 21 L. Ed. 2d 731 (1969), which ruled that public school students could not be penalized for wearing symbols, such as black armbands, to protest the Vietnam War.

Two subsequent cases dealing with issues of censorship in school newspapers pointed to a more restrictive judicial view of students' right to free expression. In Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260, 108 S. Ct. 562, 98 L. Ed. 2d 592 (1988), the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Hazelwood, Missouri, school principal who removed several articles from a student newspaper. The articles dealt with teen pregnancy and a student's feelings about her parents' divorce. The court in Hazelwood held that a school newspaper is not a public forum, and thus granted school officials the right to determine what type of student speech is appropriate and to regulate such speech.

Three years later, the ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Clark County School District, 941 F.2d 817 (9th Cir. 1991), was based on Hazelwood. In Planned Parenthood, a public high school newspaper solicited advertisements from local businesses, including Planned Parenthood. The principal refused to allow Planned Parenthood to place an advertisement in school publications and Planned Parenthood sued the school district. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court decision that a public high school publication is not a public forum and that the school could therefore accept or reject advertisements. Both Hazelwood and Planned Parenthood concluded that because public high schools are nonpublic forums, school districts can apply a limited degree of censorship.

Hundreds of public universities in the United States have speech codes to regulate students' choice of words. Speech can be constitutionally curtailed in some circumstances. For example, public colleges and universities can forbid threats of violence, prohibit obscene language and conduct (although it is extremely difficult to define or prove obscenity), and punish students for using defamatory speech against each other, all without violating the First Amendment. Numerous cases have successfully contested free speech limitations on campus, suggesting that a majority of these codes are unconstitutional.

In Doe v. University of Michigan, 721 F. Supp. 852 (E.D. Mich. 1989), a biopsychology student maintained that the university's speech code prevented him from freely discussing controversial ideas about biologically based differences between the sexes and races. A district court ruled that the university's code proscribed too great a range of speech and therefore was an unconstitutional infringement on the plaintiff's First Amendment rights. The court also held that the overbroad nature of the code denied his due process rights.

A University of Wisconsin student was accused of violating the university's speech codes by yelling rude comments at a woman. In U.W.M. Post, Inc. v. Board of Regents, 774 F. Supp. 1163 (E.D. Wis. 1991), the university's speech code was also struck down as overbroad. Two years later school officials punished fraternity brothers at George Mason University for dressing in drag and staging an "ugly woman contest." In Iota X Chapter v. George Mason University, 993 F.2d 386 (1993), the Fourth Circuit found that the university had violated the First Amendment because it did not sanction the fraternity merely for its conduct, but rather for the message conveyed by the "ugly woman contest," which ran counter to the views the university sought to foster.

Internet

Computer-mediated communication grows explosively every year and in some ways outpaces and obviates current legal principles. The prevailing concept of law applies to real-world events and transactions, and, as those in the legal field are realizing, may unravel when exercised in cyberspace. As more and more people transmit widely divergent messages on the electronic highway, issues of free speech and censorship become increasingly complicated and regulations difficult to enforce.

The first case of criminal prosecution of electronic communication involved the distribution of pornography over an electronic bulletin board system (BBS). In United States v. Thomas, No. CR-94-20019-G (W.D. Tenn. 1994), Robert Thomas and Carleen Thomas were found guilty of disseminating obscene materials by interstate telephone lines and computer. From their home in California, the Thomases ran an adults-only private BBS from which subscribers could download computer graphics files and order sexually explicit photographs and videotapes while on-line. To gather evidence against the couple, a Memphis postal inspector, under an assumed name, downloaded to his computer many of the pornographic electronic files and ordered tapes.

The Thomases were charged with, among other things, transporting obscene materials across state lines. The couple attempted to transfer their case to the Northern District of California, so that their materials would be measured against that community's standards of obscenity, rather than the obscenity standards of the Western District of Tennessee. The district judge denied their request, noting that in obscenity prosecutions the trial can be held either in the district from which the material was sent or where it was received.

The "virtual" nature of cyberspace poses a number of problems for courts and legislatures on the issue of obscenity. Among the most difficult of these is the issue of community standards. Because the Internet brings together people from all over the United States and all over the world, it defies identification with any particular community. Other difficulties are the criminal element of knowledge and the issue of dissemination. Persons may post and receive information on Internet bulletin boards without the knowledge of those who maintain the BBS, making it difficult to determine whether the BBS operators "knowingly disseminated" obscene materials.

In 1996 Congress passed the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which punished disseminating "indecent" material over the Internet. A U.S. district court struck down the act as a violation of the First Amendment. The ruling did not affect obscene material and child pornography, as those materials were already illegal.

As the Internet continues to grow as a medium of world communication, the conflict between censorship and free speech rights will continue.

See: Art Law; Entertainment Law; Schools and School Districts.

See armed forces censorship; civil censorship; field press censorship; national censorship; primary censorship; prisoner of war censorship; secondary censorship.

Quotes:

"You can cage the singer but not the song." - Harry Belafonte

"Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission." - Arnold Bennett

"Those expressions are omitted which can not with propriety be read aloud in the family." - Thomas Bowdler

"This film is apparently meaningless, but if it has any meaning it is doubtless objectionable." - British Board of Film

"The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter." - Willa Cather

"Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion." - David Cronenberg

See more famous quotes about Censorship