Censorship

I suppose I will focus on TV censoring off obscene languages and gestures. I don't oppose censorship in general but the way it is done on TV just makes everything worse off. Let me explain. First of all, the shows that usually get censored are the so-called "reality shows". Now I don't know if the participates were told to swear their heads off or the producers just let nature runs its course, but clearly no one tried to prevent swearing in the first place. Perhaps it is thought that "natural swearing" makes the show more realistic, or that coarse language, albeit censored, is a selling point like nudity.

Then there are shows like Jerry Springer, where the main selling point is two people fighting their way out of the problem, and plenty of insults mixed in with the action. There are two reasons I can think of for censoring out the swearing -- to prevent children from learning them and to cater for those who find swearing offensive. So somehow it is not acceptable to expose children to obscene words but okay to show them scenes of physical assault, and that people who'd rather not hear rude words don't find real-life fighting offensive. People usually swear when they're angry, and angry people are likely to perform other undesirable behaviour such as physically assault other people, throwing objects and making threats, all of which are worse than swearing but are probably not censored.

Having established that censoring don't really shield anyone from offensive scenes, I now show censoring is also bad for those of us who don't mind hearing verbal abuse. It's not like I enjoy listening to people swear, but if they said it, they said it. Bleeping out part of the sentence just makes it difficult to understand what they are trying to say. On shows such as Jerry Springer, where other every word is a swear word, a constant bleeping block out other non-obscene words so you have absolutely no idea what they said. To a lesser extent, I find a few bleeps in the middle of a sentence is all it takes to render it meaningless. My theory is that the mind needs to capture some minimum number of words to make them meaningful. The bleeping cuts this short so it takes extra thinking to understand the sentence. Whatever the reason, the result is still that the censorship renders the exchange of words meaningless to the audience, which in turn makes the show less enjoyable.

Frankly I think the TV stations censor their shows in order to meet certain rating restrictions, so they can show Jerry Springer in the afternoon rather than 1am. I doubt they really care about influencing kids negatively or offending elderly people. I'm damn sure they don't care about making their show impossible to understand because 50% of the conversations were bleeped out.