The Purpose Of Censorship

Most every piece of information that humans take in, whether they get it from television, the Internet or any other media outlet, has been put out by a person for a certain purpose. With these purposes, often comes censorship. Censorship is defined as the suppression of speech, public communication or other information, which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions. So the purpose of censorship, and the reason that it exists, is to alter information or media in order to control the effect that said information or media has on its audience. Censorship is often used to preserve a status quo that exists
Now this would be a potentially colossal problem, except for the fact that media influence does not affect the individual, but rather “everyone else”. This is a theory known as ‘The Third Person Effect”. The third person effect hypothesizes that the average person perceives a greater media influence on others than on themselves. Meaning that the majority of us are smart enough to acknowledge and recognize the problem, but not smart enough to realize how our own brains are being influenced on the media we take in. (Salwen) People see it in action, but don’t notice or admit how it is happening to themselves. This theory was tested using the 1996 presidential election. People were asked whether or not they were for restrictions on presidential campaigning strategies. An overwhelming yes to this political censorship indicated “abundant support” for the theory. People were more interested in what others were thinking, and how others were affected that they agreed on more censoring towards political campaigns. A concept that is quite taboo to some that hold their first amendment rights close to heart. So whether or not an individual knows they are being affected by censorship, this is clearly everyone’s problem. Unless one enjoys nothing more than sitting back and watching the world burn, or is completely void of opinion and emotion, censorship in the media has had
Him and his team of writers know exactly how they like to frame the discussion of media censorship. They pull its’ pants down and laugh at it until nobody can ignore it anymore. Stewart did no different recently when President Obama chose not to attend the Charlie Hebdo rally in Paris. (Oh) "How could the U.S. not be there when representatives of such beacons of freedom and lack of censorship as journalist-punishing Russia was there?" Stewart is quick to poke fun at issues like this, because that is his job. Today there is a large group of young people that get their news mainly from satirical sources. Which is great because who doesn’t love comedy, but the fact that shows on Comedy Central are the ones people are getting news from does seem a bit backwards. Shouldn’t news networks be held accountable for and expected to deliver reliable unfiltered information? And yea the freedom of speech scale doth swing in both directions. It all depends on what communities decide to take