ROMANA CLAY: “Welcome back to Mind over Media, and part two of our focus on the decline of newspapers. On the last show, we saw how newspapers fill their pages with sports and infotainment filler to distract the public from stories and opinions that challenge the political and economic prejudices of the paper’s corporate owners. However, this contrived information vacuum is self-defeating because it merely forces ever more people away from newspapers and onto the Internet. Today, we look at another cause of declining print influence, pre-censorship, and with me again is Professor Joseph Howe, Director of the Centre for Media Integrity in Victoria, B.C. Welcome, back professor.” (He nods politely to Romana Clay.) First, tell us what pre-censorship is and why it’s more dangerous to a healthy society than the profusion of infotainment.”
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PROFESSOR JOSEPH HOWE: “In a nutshell, pre-censorship is the active filtering of news to give a one-sided perception of reality to the public so it can be easily manipulated. This kind of censorship is immeasurably more dangerous and destructive of democracy than larding a paper with trivia and other forms of dross. As we saw last time, in the case of the Vancouver Picayune-Mirror, newspapers that do this, mostly tabloids, are not really taken seriously as newspapers. As editor Bruce James aptly demonstrated, journalistic standards at a tabloid are lower than at a broadsheet.”
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Gilad Atzmon
Dr. Qais Ghanem
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