Fresh from a thanksgiving vacation in the land of the free, I've returned to a country boiling—or, at least, tepidly heaving—with the kind of debate conducted on an almost daily basis in the US in the context of the First Amendment: the freedom of expression (see Caroline's previous post on the Oxford Union/Nick Griffin/David Irving controversy). It's an area in which we Brits, lacking a written constitution, seem to be at once less strident and more distrustful of general principles than our American cousins.
Equally on my mind, however, is the historical context of censorship, thanks largely to an arresting and timely book that appeared this September as part of Seagull's series of Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century. Entitled Censoring the Word, it consists of a 107-page essay by Julian Petley interrogating the concept of free expression in the media. His approach is both polemical and historical (with a distinctively Marxist bent), and concisely illustrates the power of the forces ranged against freedom of expression, often in the guise of offering it. This, for instance, is quoted from the eerily prescient Pilkington Report (1960) on broadcasting:
"To give the public what it wants" is a misleading phrase: misleading because as commonly used it has the appearance of an appeal to democratic principle but the appearance is deceptive. It is in fact patronising and arrogant, in that it claims to know what the public is, but defines it as no more than the mass audience; and in that, it claims to know what it wants, but it limits its choice to the average of experience. In this sense, we reject it utterly. If there is a sense in which it should be used, it is this: what the public wants and what it has the right to get is freedom to choose from the widest range of programme matter. Anything less than that is deprivation.Perhaps most striking of all, however, are Petley's reminders that—although the precedents and laws that enshrine freedom of expression today have been hard-won—dissenting modes of expression have repeatedly been driven to the margins of the media by the very different kind of freedom enshrined in mass-market economics. Between 1850 and 1920, for example, the "financial hurdle" required to run a viable British newspaper increased by over a hundred times as a result of market forces: rising expenditures and lower cover prices, engendered by technological innovation, massively forced up the circulation newspapers required to become profitable. The abolition of advertisement duty in 1853, similarly, meant papers could halve their cover prices, and then halve them again, in subsequent decades—but also that advertisers gained an effective licensing power over newspaper content, and with this the ability to bar commercially problematic writings from the mass market.
Electronically, of course, we currently enjoy a level of freedom unknown in even the headiest days of radical pamphleteering. But with the costs of exponential internet expansion likely to be inflicted at some point back on consumers, it may be as well to remember that deregulation has historically proved to be the most powerful censorship of all.
