Buy essay on The Censorship of Television

Media are significant and influential sources of information nowadays. They also have a powerful ability to form the public opinions.
The issue of media regulation has being discussed since the rise in popularity of television in 1950s. A censorship is a part of media regulation. Generally speaking, ”censorship is supervision and control of the information and ideas that are circulated among the people within a society. It refers to the assessment of media content in order to change it or hold back parts that are considered as offensive or unpleasant.” (Foerstel 1)
The programming content may be thought to be “immoral or obscene, blasphemous, seditious or subversive, or injurious to the national security”. (Manganello, Franzini and Jordan 9)
It means that the main goal of the censorship is to protection the society from such outrageous things.
What does censoring approach include? Mostly it means “exclusion of certain topics, social groups or language from the content of broadcast programming in general or at particular points in time.” (Manganello, Franzini and Jordan 9). It also means the development of certain set of systems, rules, regulations that will help to filter the media content.
There is an institution which is called the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that is a major regulator of television industry in the US. This institution has a right to restrict or censor some content of any TV channel in the country and it has developed it rules for content assessment. It also requires a balanced and fair approach to the TV programming and regulates the amounts of time that each channel has give for the “public use” programming.
The debate about the need and effectiveness of TV censorship is quite complicated and controversial. Of course, there is no doubt, that not all media content should be available for all audiences. Therefore there is an understanding that certain limitations are required depending on the type of program and its content. The content that is accessible to wide and non-selecting audiences should not have any offensive elements in it and the need in censorship is understood.
At the same time, it doesn’t that much effective. It also may have some extreme consequences and many materials that have a slight hint of inappropriate character may be excluded, which is not right.
In my opinion, the censorship in media has both the strong and weak sides. In the majority of cases the society desperately needs it, because it’s a serious tool that helps to regulate explicit language, violence or inappropriate sexual content. These elements of programming have a very negative influence on the young audience.
But it needs to be emphasized that censorship in media it is not very effective overall and society has to find ways to improve the censoring approaches, especially in terms of children’s and young people programming.
Major advantages of the censorship of television programming are:
1. The children seem to be prevented from inappropriate pornographic content.
2. Though the exclusion of content offensive to a specific religious group, religious conflicts may be avoided.
3. Information that has a strategic importance is hidden from the wide audience.
4. The exclusion of scenes with health harming behaviors (for example, smoking) serves a good task of saving the nations’ health.
5. The exclusion of violent scenes prevents from copying dangerous actions.
6. Political correctness and balance of opinions are kept through the censorship usage.
7. The knowledge about dangerous technologies is not accessible to various terrorist groups through TV.
8. The advertising with inaccurate or grossly exaggerated claims is regulated
9. The exclusion of demonstration of apparent disrespect to any person or group protects the audience from possible offences
10. The culture and moral is better protected because of the censorship and vulgarity and obscenity is mostly avoided. (Foerstel, 16)
At the same time, there are no direct evidences of the effectiveness of the censorship on TV. Among the possible disadvantages of the censorship the following could be named:
1. TV programming censorship censors some topics that may be useful for education.(for example for sex education of the young generation).
2. It is often used by leaders of societies with a low level of democracy in order to build the perfect image and exclude any negative comments about themselves and their dictatorship.
3. There is an issue of freedom of speech and where are the limits of it.
4. There is also a possibility of ignorance developing in our society because of excessive censorship appliance.
5. The perceptions of people are influenced by TV and it means that the wrong understanding may be received because of the censorship.
6. Some people claim that censorship in media influences badly on creativity and the ability to think in general.
7. Also there is a commonly known rule that if the information is hidden, public becomes even more curious and obtains it in other ways.
8. It’s basically a tool of control over society; therefore censorship often has a bad image in the eyes of the society. (Foerstel, 17)
Works cited
Foerstel, Herbert N. “Banned in the Media: A Reference Guide to Censorship in the Press, Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and the Internet.” Greenwood Press. Westport, CT. 1998: 1. Print.
Manganello, Jennifer, Franzini, Amy and Jordan, Amy. “Sampling Television Programs for Content Analysis of Sex on TV: How Many Episodes Are Enough?.” The Journal of Sex Research. 45 (1). 2008: 9. Print.