Blog post
'Censorship'
In our tutorial, we talked about the meaning of censorship and the many different examples/variations of censorship there are. An example that is relevant to New Zealand, is the censorship of distribution of the Christchurch shooting video (obvious means why), many people have been charged for the distribution of this video. The idea of censorship relating to the censorship of media reminds me of the movie 'The Constant Gardener' directed by Fernando Meirelles. The plot consists of an employee working for the government in a first world country who marries a political journalist called Tessa who shows voice of activism against the Government taking advantage of third world poverty (decreasing the health of millions). Tessa sets out to study this corruption but is censored in her journey and her discoveries - she is killed sadly due to her discoveries of corruption from the British Government. Her husband, the employee knows of her work and sets out to find out what happened to her in action against the Government and evidently is shown the same fate as his wife. The movie provides great visualisation of censorship behind the scenes and how much power some Governments have over media, resources, money and politics.
That is an interesting example. In our tutorial we also discussed different varying examples of censorship in the New Zealand context. Firstly, in NZ there are essentially just two companies that have a monopoly over the NZ media - MediaWorks and NZME.
ReplyDeleteWe also got into a discussion about the fine line between censoring free speech and hate speech - for example at the start of the year there was a lot of media attention when two far-right Canadian speakers were prevented from speaking in Auckland by the Auckland council. Many people were very outraged by this and cited the need for free speech as their reasoning. While others argued that it was not censoring free speech but rather censoring hate speech.
Here's an article about it: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/397973/auckland-council-taken-to-court-over-far-right-speaking-event-ban
Sounds like a really interesting movie, Maddy - it's based on a interesting John Le Carre novel, too.
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