Censorship

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 21 March 2013

There is supposed to be a Leveson Part II, although everyone has forgotten about it. As well as telling him to look into everything bad about newspapers (‘Please could you clean the Augean stables by Friday, Hercules’), David Cameron also asked Lord Justice Leveson to investigate who did what when over phone-hacking. This was postponed because of the forthcoming criminal trials, but I mention it because it is a reminder that things are back to front. Normally when you have an inquiry, you first work out what happened and then you work out what to do about it. Leveson is the opposite, hence the resulting chaos. The problem is particularly

Thursday

Michael Paraskos

‘Lord Horror: Reverbstorm’, by David Britton and John Coulthart – review

As the son of the last British artist to be successfully prosecuted for displaying obscene paintings, I have some empathy with David Britton, the last person successfully prosecuted in Britain for publishing obscene literature. Unlike my father, who accidentally strayed into the purview of the police, Britton’s prosecution in 1992 was almost inevitable. His publisher, Manchester-based Savoy Books, was raided by the police with vindictive regularity between 1976 and 1997. Ironically, Savoy has often been reviled as much by the left for its lack of political correctness as by the right for attacking the shibboleths of authority. It embodies a longstanding tradition of non-conformist and essentially anarchist thinking in Britain

Thursday

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 — the fight for press freedom and an EU problem for Cameron

What effect would any form of statutory regulation have on the press in this country? In this week’s cover feature, Nick Cohen writes that if the Leveson Inquiry recommends strong measures to curtail the press, they will not be practical thanks to the constant evolution of the media industry. On this week’s View from 22 podcast, Nick explains the problems of defining who exactly is the press and who are journalists: ‘You can’t say what a newspaper is and you can’t say who a journalist is. When I started in journalism, people used to say it was a trade, not a profession…that was true in theory but false in practice — you

Thursday

Emily Rhodes

China bans Haruki Murakami’s ‘1Q84’: George Orwell would have seen the irony

Books – or lack thereof – are the latest manifestation of anti-Japanese sentiment in China. The escalating dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has provoked some Beijing bookshops to remove Japanese books from their shelves. The most prominent book to be made to disappear is Haruki Murakami’s recent novel 1Q84, a critically acclaimed worldwide bestseller. Rather ironically, given the circumstances, the title echoes Orwell’s 1984 – in Japanese, ‘Q’ and ‘9’ are homonyms. Orwell has an uncanny knack of turning up at the choicest moments. Remember the glitch in July 2009 when Amazon deleted 1984 from everyone’s Kindles? People were startled by the realisation that Amazon could remove a book from

Tuesday

Douglas Murray

The worst form of censorship

A week ago, the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were burned down. This attack came after it advertised the founder of Islam, Muhammad, as ‘editor-in-chief’ of the new issue. The move was a light-hearted response to the very serious matter of the election of an Islamist party (the Ennahda party) as the leading party in Tunisia (a result which, incidentally, appears not to have greatly bothered most European media). As the staff of Charlie Hebdo contemplated the ruins of their magazine, a much grander and richer magazine, Time, ran one of those pieces which have become familiar whenever there is an Islamist assault against free speech. As

Sunday

David Blackburn

Free speech dies another death in Burma

The joy of Aung San Suu Kyi being given Internet access for the first time on Friday has proved transient. Time magazine reports that Irrawaddy, Burma’s premier English language magazine, has been forced to close its print operation for financial reasons.   Irrawaddy is a clandestine publication, revered as an ‘open window into an opaque country’ by observers of South-East Asian politics. Burma’s stringent censorship is enforced with determination, but the demise of Irrawaddy’s deadwood edition is a telling reminder that penury is the best form of censorship. Irrawaddy’s circulation was tiny, and the magazine relied on donations from pro-democracy groups in the West, whose coffers are empty and resolve

Saturday

Wednesday

Martin Bright

Humbling Free Expression Awards

I am always blown away by the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards. But for some reason, last night’s event seemd to throw up an even more astonishing roster of award winners than usual. It was also good that so many were there in person. (In a surreal touch, Paul Staines, aka Guido Fawkes, was also there in person at a table he had bought for the occasion). The Sri Lankan paper, The Sunday Leader, won the journalism award, which was collected by Lal Wickrematunge. Lal explained he and his brother Lasantha had started the magazine 15 years ago on a shoestring budget and distributed it from the back of