Posts Tagged ‘usenet’

Continuing through Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media,” his explanation of the growth of the motion picture industry included an in-depth description of the political disputes over the new medium. Facing strong opposition from the self-appointed guardians of morality, the movie makers created internal guidelines of censorship. However, they didn’t always follow them to the level of Puritanical morality which some wanted. In addition, the Supreme Court had created legal precedents which weakened the level of First Amendment protection offered to movies as opposed to newspapers and other print media.

“The differences in outcomes between print and screen reflected the different legal and economic conditions of the two media. Not only did the Constitution and the courts afford stronger protection to the press; the far more fragmented publishing industry had no central organization comparable to the Hays Office that could have carried out a neocorporatist form of censorship. The movies became the target of Catholic pressure in the 1930s because key figures in the movement understood that the industry was vulnerable to pressure and because moral reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, had come to believe that the movies were singularly important as a destructive influence.”

Is today’s media environment more like print or screen? An explosion of online publication and distribution may serve to counteract mainstream media consolidation, but do new media sources really mirror the fragmentation of nineteenth-century news? With the oligopolistic market status of ISPs, no. In fact, Usenet might once have been thought to be fragmented and resilient to censorship, but in recent weeks, it has been severely filtered. The source of control: ISPs who are “voluntarily” censoring Usenet to stop certain child pornographers, just like the Hays Office which was heavy handed and overbearing.

[Other posts in this series here and here.]