Censorship

Censorship is an action of limited using of speech or other form of public communication that may contain harmful, sensitive, or offensive information to the main public (Wikipedia). Therefore, the government or other organizations may propose related regulations to prevent the potential harms that might be resulted from the media sources.

The types of censorship highly depend on the kind of information that is potentially harmful to the public and therefore needs to be censored. Moral censorship is the most common one and it requires removing the materials that are considered morally questionable. Pornography often falls under this category and it is illegal to expose these materials to the general public especially to children. Another type of censorship is recognized as military censorship, and the major task is to keep the military tactics confidential and prevent them being exposed to the enemies.

However, the issue of censorship has brought a hot debate into the public, people are more concerned with the freedom of speech and expression of their opinions especially for the news media. The public is worried about losing the democratic status in the society. For example, the news of War of Iraq, the information has been somehow limited and hided from the public because of political pressure and chaos it might bring consequently. When Internet users are browsing online for the news, they might only see and comment on the information, which has already been censored by the government in order to make sure that no intense news has been released. Due to the reason that higher mortality rate during the wartime will cause negative domestic influence. The positive side for censorship for certain news is trying to protect the public, but in the long run, the public will inevitable question the news and they will potentially lose confidence and trust in government.

This is what I have been experienced about the debate over censorship towards news media through TV shows and Internet-based providers.