Censorship
Nothing but net?
Monday, July 13th, 2009The NZ government and NZ ISPs are quietly working on a form of internet filtering that starts to look a bit like censorship. Read these fascinating analyses.
Queer censorship rules
Friday, May 29th, 2009Noticed that you can’t find Queer as Folk at your local video shop? Actually, you can’t find any of these titles either. As Andrew Armitage explains, it’s because it’s too expensive to get them classified. Even if they’ve been on TV. Even if you could order them through Amazon.com. Even if they’ve been in the […]
Books banned in New Zealand
Thursday, February 5th, 2009The censor’s office has posted an interesting list of the books banned or restricted here since 1965.
250 books have been banned or restricted in that period. Interestingly, nearly two-thirds of those bans/restrictions have been since the passage of the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act in 1993, and nearly a third were in the period 1996-1998.
I […]
It’s censorship, John, but not as we know it
Friday, August 15th, 2008Poor John Boscowan. He’s been censored.
I know this, because he’s got “censored” written across his full-page Sunday Star-Times ad opposing the Electoral Finance Act.
Yes, apart from being one of the few people in the country able to afford to express his views in 850 words in a full-page ad in one of the nation’s biggest […]
T-shirty
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008The Society for the Promotion of Community Standards was angered by this T-shirt (scroll down a bit). So they asked the censor to ban it. He did.
You might be surprised that T-shirts can be censored. But they can, just like books, films, papers, billboards, or material on a website.
Why did he ban it? Well, it’s […]
NZ Censor Doesn’t Stymie Grand Theft Auto Plot
Monday, April 28th, 2008You could be forgiven for getting the opposite impression from the NZ Herald’s headline:
Censor Stymies Grand Theft Auto Plot
It rather suggests that our censor has carved out chunks of the latest version of the wildly popular - and wildly violent - video game Grand Theft Auto.
Nope.
If you read the story carefully, hang your head sideways […]
Free speech audit in Australia
Thursday, December 6th, 2007Former NSW Ombudsman Irene Moss has conducted an audit into the state of free speech in Australia and concluded that “free speech and media freedom are being whittled away by gradual and sometimes almost imperceptible degrees.”
I confess I’m always a bit suspicious of death-by-a-thousand-cuts claims, since they often overlook or underestimate the ways in which free speech […]