This topic has come up a few times on JWD, and I feel like there are a wide variety of opinions, viewpoints, and outlooks concering it. Naturally as a professional journalist for most of my life, I have some finely tuned opinions about it myself - largely unexpressed. I fear if I let fly with my unvarnished, raw opinions I would likely piss off not a few people here and I really don't want to do that - at least not where this topic is concerned.
HOWEVER my philosophical feelings about it can be expressed with much more subtlety via the use of a poem I wish I'd written, but whose true author is Mason Williams. Now is as good a time as any. Those of you who are of my vintage may remember it from the Smothers Brothers' Comedy Hour and the reign of Lyndon B. Johnson as defined by the Vietnamese War.
I invite you to ruminate, verily, to ponder the implications of the desire to essay censorious remarks, and more, to wit (and slightly modified, for which apologies are profusely offered):
The Censor sits
Somewhere between
The words to be seen
And the screen which sees With his scissor purpose poised
Watching the human stuff
That will sizzle through
The magic wires
And light up
Like welding shops
The ho-hum web sites of the world
And with a kindergarten
Arts and crafts concept
Of moral responsibility
Snips out
The rough talk
The unpopular opinion
Or anything with teeth
And renders
A pattern of ideas
Full of holes
A doily
For your mind
Your comments are solicited, nay, humbly requested.
francois