Censorship is a word of many meanings.  In its broadest sense it refers to suppression of information, ideas, or artistic expression by anyone, whether government officials, church authorities, private pressure groups, or speakers, writers, and artists themselves.  It may take place at any point in time, whether before an utterance occurs, prior to its widespread circulation, or by punishment of communicators after dissemination of their messages, so as to deter others from like expression.  In its narrower, more legalistic sense, censorship means only the prevention by official government action of the circulation of messages already produced.  Thus writers who "censor" themselves before putting words on paper, for fear of failing to sell their work, are not engaging in censorship in this narrower sense, nor are those who boycott sponsors of disliked television shows.  Yet all of these restraints have the effect of limiting the diversity that would otherwise be available in the marketplace of ideas and so may be considered censorship in its broadest sense.

There are almost as many justifications offered for the suppression of communication as there are would-be censors, but at root the motivation is always the same.  It is a fear that the expression, if not curtailed, will do harm to individuals in its audience or to society as a whole.  Thus so-called obscene material is attacked because of a fear that it will corrupt personal morality or perhaps even lead to deviant sexual acts.  School textbooks and library materials are sought to be purged by groups who fear that they may inculcate subversive values in children.  Information concerning national security is controlled by government, with particular severity in wartime, for fear that its revelation may aid an enemy. Religious heresies are feared by church leaders as a threat to the survival of the faith.  Pretrial publicity about a crime may jeopardize a fair trial.  Publication of personal information by police (such as the names of rape victims) or by the press (such as one's sexual preferences) may seriously intrude on one's right to privacy.  The fear of such consequences, real or imagined, is what drives the censorial impulse.

Censorship has been practiced in both the narrower and the broader senses as long as there have been organized cultures. Those societies which have been most confident of their principles and of the loyalty of their members have allowed the greatest freedom from censorship, for they have been the least fearful of the consequences of dissent.  In societies whose values have not been fully accepted by their people or whose leadership rests on shaky foundations, the heaviest hand of censorship has fallen.  The relative prevalence of censorship is one of the features that has most distinguished autocratic from democratic societies and is most obvious in the thoroughgoing preventive censorship practiced today in nations such as Communist Albania.  Nevertheless, even the freest of nations find some forms of censorship necessary.

Although one may look to Athens as the birthplace of democracy, it produced its share of censorship.  Athenian legislators who were suspected of "dishonorable acts" were subjected to the "scrutiny of orators," an inquiry that could lead to a ban on further speaking in the assembly or courts.  Socrates was condemned to death for "corrupting the youth" of Athens with his ideas.  The first recorded case of suppression of a theatrical performance occurred in 204 BC in Rome when the comic poet \TNaevius\t was convicted of slander for poking fun at public officials.  Later, Emperor Nero deported critics and burned manuscripts of which he disapproved.

The most notable censorship of the Middle Ages was by church authorities seeking to stamp out heresy.  The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 proscribed the works of Aristotle;  the Council of Trent in 1564 established the \TIndex\t of Forbidden Books, which was to last for centuries;  and in 1633, Galileo was forced by the Inquisition to disavow his Copernican belief that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

CENSORSHIP IN BRITAIN

In 1520 a shipment of allegedly heretical books from the Continent to England alarmed the clergy there and led to a proclamation (1529) by Henry VIII against heretical and blasphemous books. Henry then established a licensing system that required the screening of all matter that was to be printed. That system was condemned in John Milton's famous pamphlet Aeropagitica (published without a license in 1644) and was repealed by Parliament in 1695. Concern over religious heresy gave way in 18th-century England to a preoccupation with attacks on public officials, which were labeled "seditious libel"; in the 19th century obscenity became the chief censorial worry. In 1802 a Society for the Suppression of Vice was founded by Thomas Bowdler, who gave a new term to the English language when he "bowdlerized" (pruned of "indecent" language) an edition of Shakespeare. In 1857, Parliament adopted the Obscene Publications Act, which established procedures for the seizure of obscene material. Starting in the 16th century, the theater in London was also subjected to preproduction review of its plays by the lord chancellor--a practice that was not ended until 1968. Present-day Britain maintains rigid controls over press coverage of pending and ongoing criminal trials, has a strict law against racist rhetoric, and curbs the release of government material through its Official Secrets Act (1911).

CENSORSHIP IN THE UNITED STATES

Although the legal system in the United States has descended from British law, there have been significant deviations, the most dramatic being the written guarantees of freedom of expression embodied in the 1\TSt\t AMENDMENT to the Constitution. Historians continue to debate what the nation's founders meant to include when they wrote that there shall be "no law" abridging the freedom of speech or press, but there is agreement that, at least, they wished to reject the common law of seditious libel, thus making public officials fair game for criticism (see \TNew York Times Company v.  Sullivan\t), and to create a barrier against prior restraints by government.

U.S.  censorship today is most evident in the areas of government secrecy, public school textbooks and libraries, obscenity and indecency, and restraints (primarily nongovernmental) on the mass media of communication.

Government Secrecy

Information that is produced or collected by government covers a tremendous range.  Much of it clearly must be shared with the public if citizens are to make informed judgments about public policy.  Some of it just as clearly must be withheld from the public, whether to protect military secrets, investigations of criminal activity, or the privacy of individuals who have been compelled to submit personal data for census or tax purposes. It is the gray area in between that leads to battles.  The government may attempt to suppress material it claims must be kept confidential for national security or other reasons when in fact the principal motive may be to avoid personal or political embarrassment.

Since the administration of George Washington there have been repeated struggles between Congress and the president over information that the legislature wanted to have and that the executive wished to withhold.  These contests over what later came to be called \Texecutive privilege\t were usually resolved by mutual accommodation.  It was not until Richard M. Nixon persisted in his refusal to release particular tape recordings being sought by the \TWatergate\t special prosecutor that the matter ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court.  In \TUnited States v. Richard M. Nixon\t in 1974 the Court recognized that although there may be some circumstances in which executive privilege might justifiably be claimed, Watergate was not one of them.  Twelve days later the incriminating "smoking gun" tape was released, and three days after that Nixon became the first U.S. president to resign from office.

Other examples of the withholding of government information are the sometimes arbitrary classification of material as secret or top secret and thus not to be divulged;  the many exemptions from disclosure that were included in the \TFreedom of Information Act\t of 1966, such as those for internal personnel matters, trade secrets, and matters related to national defense and the conduct of foreign policy;  the contracts that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employees are required to sign promising for the rest of their lives to submit to the agency for prior review any publication of information learned as a result of their employment (a system that President Ronald Reagan's administration proposed to extend to a much broader range of federal employees);  and the exclusion of the press from access to certain events, such as the initial stages of the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983.  With regard to the right of press and public to observe trial proceedings, however, the Supreme Court said in 1980 in Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia that in the absence of "overriding interest... access to a criminal trial must be open to the public."

Sometimes government efforts to withhold information are thwarted by leaks or by diligent investigative reporting, in which event another tool of censorship is sometimes invoked--a court injunction or restraining order against press dissemination of the material.  The Supreme Court in the \TPentagon Papers\t case overturned the temporary restraining order that had been issued by a lower court and held that there is a strong presumption against such prior restraints.  The 1st Amendment, said one of the justices, places upon the government the heavy burden of proving that the information, if released, would lead to "direct, immediate and irreparable harm" (see \TNew York Times Company v. United States\t.  That precedent became the basis a few years later of a government lawsuit against The Progressive magazine to prevent publication of an article entitled "The H-Bomb Secret:  How We Got It--Why We're Telling It." The government alleged that the article's dissemination would violate the secrecy provision of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and would result in serious harm to the nation.  The magazine countered that it wished the public to realize that the so-called secret of the H-bomb was a myth, the information in the article having been gleaned entirely from publicly available sources.  The suit resulted in the first injunction granted on national security grounds in the history of the United States.  Several months later, however, while that decision was pending on appeal, the government asked that the injunction be vacated and the case dismissed because essentially the same information had by that time been circulated in other publications.  Meanwhile, The Progressive's article had been successfully censored for six months.

As for injunctions against publication of information about pending criminal trials--so-called "gag orders" on the press--the Supreme Court held unanimously in Nebraska Press Association v.  Stuart in 1976 that such orders are permitted only as a last resort, when all other means of securing a fair trial, such as moving its location and sequestering the jury, are inadequate.  Some of the justices went further to say that such orders should never be allowed.

Public Schools and Libraries

Another arena that has been rife with controversies over censorship has been the public school system, where students, teachers, parents, administrators, and outside pressure groups often vie over the information and ideas to which students should be exposed.  Frequently, the courts are called upon to adjudicate these disputes, not always with consistent results. Generally, it has been held that students may circulate underground newspapers and other literature without censorship by school officials if they do not disrupt the educational process.  Regular school newspapers, supported by public funds, may be subjected to the counsel of a faculty advisor, prior review of material, and even to required deletions if those decisions are reasonable and conform to announced criteria. Policies regarding textbook adoptions and removals vary from state to state, or from school district to district.  Some educational authorities have fairly elaborate written procedures to ensure participation by the public, and others operate more informally and even mysteriously.  Texas, which has one of the largest school populations in the country, has a Textbook Commission that must approve all books to be used in the state's public schools.  A decision by that body can have a restrictive impact on the entire nation (as it had in the treatment of evolution in biology texts), for book publishers do not want their wares to be excluded from one of their largest markets, and they censor their manuscripts accordingly. Furthermore, an inordinate amount of influence by a small but diligent pressure group may be exerted on the decisions of such a commission.

The effects of pressure groups are also commonly felt with respect to material in school libraries.  All across the country over the years there have been and continue to be incidents in which school officials have ordered the removal from their libraries of everything from J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice (1968) to various works by Judy Blume and Kurt Vonnegut.  The grounds have been objectionable language, allegedly unpatriotic or immoral ideologies, or too vivid a portrayal of unpleasant realities.  The Supreme Court in 1982 ruled that students and parents are entitled to court review of such decisions but that school boards must have broad discretion.  They violate the 1st Amendment only if their motivation is to suppress ideas "in a narrowly partisan or political manner," but not if their criterion is educational suitability.

Obscenity and Indecency

Remarkable changes have occurred in the United States since the days before 1933, when James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) was barred from import into the country (see \Tpornography\t). Despite the continued position of a slim majority of the Supreme Court that laws against the dissemination of obscene material, even to consenting adults, do not violate the 1st Amendment (see \TMiller v. California\t), as a practical matter, sexually oriented material of a great variety is widely available in "adult" bookstores and movie houses as well as on videotapes. Zoning regulations to control the location of "adult establishments," also upheld by the Supreme Court, are more frequently invoked, as are the Supreme Court-approved laws adopted in many states against child pornography--pictorial material depicting youngsters engaged in sexual activities. The Supreme Court, finally, has upheld the power of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to require broadcasters to confine the airing of "indecent" language to time periods when children are not likely to be in the audience.

Restraints on the Mass Media

Aside from restraints on obscenity and indecency, broadcasting in the U.S. has been largely free from government censorship because it has policed itself quite vigorously.  Responding to a combination of forces, such as pressure from advertisers who sponsor programs and public sentiment as expressed through the all-powerful ratings or through the threat of boycotts, broadcasters have historically erred on the side of caution. One exception has been the portrayal of violence on television, which has aroused the concern of parent groups whose lobbying has been somewhat successful in bringing about change. Occasional libel suits against hard-hitting TV journalism--such as the inconclusive but costly one of Gen. William \TWestmoreland\t against CBS (1984-85) for its treatment of his command during the Vietnam War--may have some inhibiting effect on broadcast communication.

As to motion-pictures, dramatic changes have occurred during the 20th century.  In 1915 the Supreme Court described movies as merely entertainment and thus outside the protections of the 1st Amendment;  in 1952, however, the Court rejected that precedent.  The prescreening and licensing of movies was still tolerated by the Court, however, and was widely practiced until the mid-1960s.  Simultaneously, the movie industry operated under a self-imposed code of standards that was originally very conservative in its provisions but was liberalized over the years.  By the mid-1970s governmental movie censorship boards had been almost universally abolished and the advisory classification of movies as being for adults or for a general audience had been widely adopted, with some communities invoking the force of law to keep children from adult movies but most relying on the voluntary actions of theater managers. At the same time the content of motion pictures had been thoroughly revolutionized as to the bluntness of the language used, the explicitness of sexual activity portrayed, and the vividness of violence depicted.  Movies, as well as the magazines and books sold in the United States today, are virtually free of the hand of the censor.

Franklyn S. Haiman

Bibliography:  Curry, Richard O., Freedom at Risk (1988); DeGrazia, E., and Newman, R.  K., Banned Films (1982);  Haiman, F.  S., Speech and Law in a Free Society (1981);  Halperin, Morton H., and Hoffman, Daniel N., Top Secret (1977);  Hurwitz, Leon, Historical Dictionary of Censorship in the United States (1985);  Levy, Leonard, Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History (1963) and Treason against God (1981).

See also: \Tfreedom of speech\t; \Tfreedom of the press\t.