Does censorship violate freedom of press religion assembly or speech?

Answer 1

Censorship restricts (and therefore violates) freedom of the press and sometimes freedom of speech too. The violation of 'freedom of assembly' and of 'freedom of worship' are usually described using these words and are also serious violations of fundamental rights.

Answer 2

It depends on how far you go with it. It's perfectly acceptable to censor material distributed to non-adults. Like with any law banning children from certain activities, such as drinking, getting into R or NC17 rated theatre films, voting, purchasing cigarettes, etc., laws on media censorship regulate the intake of inappropriate material for adolescents. With adulthood, though, comes responsibility, and freedom of speech. Certain material may be censored for children, but should not be censored for adults because the producers of such material are exercising the First Ammendment. Although some materials may deem morally wrong or even dangerous in the eyes of our Supreme Court, it is not for them, but the public to decide what they see. Such is one of the basic concepts of democracy and freedom of the press/individuals. Despite this, the Supreme Court still unconstitionally, -in my opinion, at least-, filters through adult content (example: the SAFE Act on obscene images, which allows heterosexual, pornographic images, but not homosexual ones. Of course, there is a good aspect to this law. It promotes the wipe out of kiddie porn, which is illegal and definitely not protected under the First Ammendment. But that's another issue.) So does censorship violate freedom of speech? When dealing with children, no. When dealing with adults, yes. It's a simple as that.

The other area where censorship is a permissible violation of free speech is in the area of National Security. While the use of the National Security exception is (in my opinion) excessively used and too broadly applied, the base concept is sound: the fundamental principle of freedom of speech (which is specifically tied to political speech so that we may have a government responsible to its people and one which is open to any new ideas) does not conflict with the restriction of access to certain items which may be of military (or these days, economic) use to an enemy. For instance - requiring the redaction of the names of US informants when releasing sensitive reports is entirely acceptable if the lives of those informants would be at risk, or if revealing their identity would seriously adversely affect the ability to recruit new informants, but it is NOT OK to redact simply to save someone from embarrassment.