Machan's Little Libertarian Encyclopedia
Chapter 4: Censorship
Strictly speaking, unless the government prohibits or regulates publications or other types of expression of ideas, there is no censorship in a community. However, since most societies contain numerous social organizations that are at least partly the province of government administration, especially primary, secondary and higher educational institutions, indirect censorship is also possible.
For example, if a public high school publishes a student paper and the administration regulates or prohibits what can be published, a kind of censorship occurs. If the high school were a private institution and its administrators spelled out guidelines concerning what may be published and how, this would be more or less sensible internal editing. But since a public high school is administered by the school board, which is an arm of the government, its guidelines, while often sensible enough, cannot escape being censorial. The same goes for such semi-public enterprises as Public Broadcasting Service, National Public Radio, and, especially, the Voice of America, an arm of the US Information Agency. Since there is no fair competition with such organizations, their funding from taxes makes their existence immune from the full force of the free market (that is, the choices of consumers) what they elect to exclude from their array of offerings may be said to have been censored, even if that is far from the intent of those in charge.
Another example of indirect censorship came to light in early 2000. The Clinton White House had tried to negotiate a deal with the commercial TV networks concerning the content of TV entertainment. The proposal, kept from the public for some time, was to trade some mandatory public service messages television stations must air (it is one price extracted from them for their license to broadcast) in return for their inserting anti-drug abuse messages into the story lines of television programming directed to kids. The carrot for this had been for the networks to save money by not having to air the unpaid ads.
During a roundtable discussion on PBS-TV several news reporters discussed this topic and while two of them objected not just to the secrecy but to the substance of the deal, two others found fault only with the secrecy while finding the idea of the deal quite palatable. The argument in support went this way: The networks are using public airwaves, the electromagnetic spectrum that had been nationalized on the floor of the US Senate back in 1927 (giving rise to the establishment, at first of the Federal Radio and later the Federal Communications Commission); this empowered the federal government to call some of the shots as far as the use to which the networks will put the signals that travel via the spectrum; so the FCC, and by some perverse extension the White House itself, is authorized to impose terms of usage on network television. QED.
We have here a way government intrudes, via indirect censorship, on the free society via the process of making something public that never should have been made so. Why should government own the airwaves? There is no rational, moral justification for this, although many rationalizations have been cooked up. It is socialist governments that characteristically nationalize important resources in the countries which they rule. Socialism is the political philosophy according to which individuals do not even exist but are only dependent parts of the larger whole that is society.
Private property is anathema to socialism. The institution of the right to private property is a concrete, practical implementation of individual rights. It makes the free exercise of religion, of freedom of speech and expression possible for individuals. They can thus act independently of the wishes of others, should they so choose, including of the wishes of the government which in such a society has as its proper role the adjudication of disputes about conflicting rights claims. Beyond such adjudication, and the associated legal processes, governments in a free society are supposed to refrain from running the various tasks people may wish to embark upon, including providing entertainment in return for payment or advertising time.
The beginning of the corruption of the proper role of government is the transformation of a system of private property rights into a system of public ownership of valued resources for example, the electromagnetic spectrum that in American had been nationalized in 1927. When this commenced, the rights of individuals begin to be eroded and government begins to set various agendas for society.
In democratic systems this can only be done if a sizable enough constituency supports these agenda. If the rights of individuals are not firmly respected and protected, the public realm can be increased by way of congressional acts and even presidential edicts. Having nationalized the airwaves, the government can impose various conditions for its use and even undertake underhanded deals that would use the broadcasters as propagandists for various goals deemed to be important.
In the USA and many other Western societies, there is a fairly strong tradition of government not exercising its power over the printed media. Radio and television, however, are another matter entirely. In the USA, as noted above, broadcast television and radio are not privately owned. They must obtain a license from the federal government in order to gain permission to operate.
The print media does not face this constraint and is, therefore, more plausibly considered free of all censorship. Thus broadcasting tends to operate with the permission of the state and while such permission is often quite open, programming tends to seem to be uncensored, especially regarding the discussion of ideas. (Even there, however, such measures as the equal access law tend to discourage discussion since high costs are imposed on broadcasters who must invite opposing views at their own expense.)
Cable television or narrow casting tends to be free of federal control. But because many of these services are regulated locally, given, for example, special monopoly status and protected from full blown competition (except from satellite services), they too face a measure of government involvement that can issue in certain kinds of programming restrictions. In some communities, for example, there are restrictions of adult programming to certain times of the day.
In a fully free society government would no more be permitted to exercise power over any kind of expression of ideas, opinions, artistic preferences, and the like than it is permitted to govern religious expression. A complete separation of state and media, akin to the current nearly complete separation of state and religion, would be the status quo.
Some problems do face the theory of total separation, however. One of them is whether any libel and slander laws would exist in such a society. Some argue that because people own their reputation, if others make false charges against them, this constitutes an invasive act, a violation of property rights, in effect. But there are those who find it highly doubtful that anyone owns his or her reputation, given that what other people think of someone is up to those other people and thus cannot be owned. There is also the issue of whether patent and trademark laws constitute some type of grant of monopoly or a valid recognition of ownership based on first creation.
Still, apart from such borderline cases, no government control of the media would be permitted in a fully free society. In other words, since the legal authority would have as its sole task to secure the basic rights of individuals, and since individual have a basic right to liberty, which includes freely expressing themselves in forums they own or have permission from the owner to make use of, the legal authority would have no basis for embarking on any kind of censorship.
Basically, then, the surest protection against censorship is having the laws focus on the protection of individual rights, especially the right to private property. In socialist systems, in contrast, government owns everything and this gives them total de jure control over what is done with the resources available. Without government providing the materials, books, journals, magazines, newspapers, and the various electronic media are unable to function. IF the resources are to be secured, government can set terms and this basically means nothing gets aired that government considers unsuited for dissemination.
The problem in welfare states, where governments own a sizable portion of the resources needed to live various lives, to carry out various projects, governments can also steer various activities in directions they favor. And the larger the public sector, the more of this "guidance" is likely, including in the content of the media.