Originally posted by corfy
And blugh, you make it sound as if the US is the only country in the world where this occurs. Show me one news source, any news source anywhere, that reports all of the news all around the world all the time. It doesn't exist, unless you lump "the Internet" into one giagantic news source. You have to choose what you report on. At my newspaper, we subscribe to the Associated Press Wire. We get hundreds of stories a day, but we can only print a small number of those in our paper, so we decide what goes and what stays. That isn't censorship. Today, for example, in our world section, we ran stories about SARS, the latest updates from Iraq, the Asia Bird Flu that is infecting humans, and the first Starbucks in France. From the choices we had, those are the ones we decided to run. We just didn't have room for the Israel/Palestine story, Singapore Death Penalty, Libya WMD policy, the Vietnam MIA remains, or any of the dozens of other stories we received. If we had more room, we probably would have run more stories. Maybe we will run some of these stories tomorrow. Granted, the AP wire is the only one we subscribe to, but we can't afford any of the others. It would be great to have Knight-Ridder, Ruetgers, and the others, but we have to draw the line somewhere.
But what happens when you systematically choose not to put a topic in your paper. Say, you've got all those stories on AP but you or someone higher up decides not to cover the Singapore Death Penalty ever. Then people who only use your paper as a source for news will never find out and its been censored. I wouldn't expect everything to be in the paper every day, even every week or month, but if you repeatedly choose to not show something then you, or whoever decides not to show it, is censoring. Look at how little criticism of the war was on the TV... I'd look up the stats, but I don't have my stuff with me at the moment... I'll post it later.