Media censorship is an issue that has persisted in America for decades. It has been fought and restricted by the Supreme Court, but like a bad weed, it keeps finding a way to break back into our society. The government has changed the way they play the game, now resorting to strong arming those they are seeking to censor with back alley threats and heavy intimidation. These threats are difficult to prove and often times go unreported, so we don’t even know that it’s happening until someone leaks the information, which makes this sort of thing very difficult to prove in court. However, I do not think that this is a fight we can afford to miss out on; censorship has been proven throughout our history to be bad for the public, harmful to our psyche as a nation, and against our legally defined beliefs. It is for these reasons that the media and any company facing governmental pressure needs to stand up and call for legislation to be created making these kinds threats illegal.

This will be no easy task. As previously mentioned, the Supreme Court has tried to place legal restrictions on this sort of thing before beginning in 1931 with the landmark Supreme Court case, Near v. Minnesota. Near was the first case in which a citizen stood up to the government when they tried to exercise prior restraint over his newspaper for publishing negative stories about a ranking government official. It is because of this case, that the media are able to publicly critique our government when they step out of line. They can do this without fear of governmental restriction by making it illegal for the government to take preventative action over malicious or scandalous news stories just because they didn’t like what the article said. This case is becoming extremely relevant as we watch this new presidency unfold and threats of media bans are being tossed around like nobody’s business. President Trump has been clear about his distrust of most media and has publicly stated that several major media outlets who have criticized him will be removed from the White House press room and restricted from receiving any direct source of government information. 

This sort of thing has actually happened before during the Iraq War under the Bush administration. Alan Greenblatt reported in the CQ Press that in 2004, due to fear of offending government officials that determine which media outlets have direct access to the White House press room, media outlets altered how they reported on the war in order to please the government. Washington Post reporter, Walter Pincus, went on record talking about how his story questioning the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was shot down because it directly contradicted President Bush’s statements, and would decrease war support which was not what the government wanted. These skewed reports and Bush’s public questioning of the media who did not agree with him caused the public to swiftly lose faith in the media, much like they are today with the rise of ‘fake news’. Had the media outlets felt safe enough in their standing to criticise the government, who knows if we would have stayed to fight in Iraq. For all we know, an entire war could have been derailed, but the media felt like they could not do their jobs without punishment.

Government censorship has always been stronger during wartimes, in fact, it used to be legal. During World War II, the government restricted news outlets from publishing anything negative about the war from 1945 till 1952 and told them only to publish propaganda statements to encourage war support. This restriction was placed on many industries but it had the strongest effect in news corporations, especially concerning the Hiroshima bombings. All of America’s war efforts in Japan had been censored leading up to the bombings to promote positive thoughts on the war: movies and commercials were instructed to have Japanese enemies, show war as only killing super villains rather than citizens, and avoiding images of mass numbers of gruesomely wounded American soldiers or the conditions that they had to live in. The bombings themselves were marketed as a massive success in killing the enemy, as well as saving countless civilian lives by, essentially, ending the war. 

America rejoiced in their military victory and took pride in what had happened. It wasn’t until after the war was over and the ban was lifted that the media could publish the real story; photos of the children murdered, cities flattened, and the mass death of average citizens just like those reading. Before the entire country had been painted as gun wielding men fighting against freedom, it never showed the actual families being affected by our war. Jiyoon Lee makes this clear in her article, “A Veiled Truth: The U.S. Censorship of the Atomic Bomb,” where she discussed how had the real story been published during the war, Americans probably would not have supported it and criticism of the government’s choices may have had a greater effect on what went down, but the didn’t. The government had instead chosen to censor their war efforts to gain the support that they needed to wage their war. Yes, this did have some positive effects; after the bombings  there was no hope of reviving the almost finished world war, Americans got to feel as though they had received retribution for the events surrounding Pearl Harbor, it established America as the leading world power, and it most definitely unified our country around the idea of the American hero. These positives, however, do not outweigh the lives lost or the great corruption of the trust between citizens and government that had previously existed in our country, a trust that was then further broken when the Pentagon Papers were created just ten years later.

Shortly after the World War II media ban, the existence of the Pentagon Papers came to light and the next big court case for media rights began. The New York Times leaked documents nicknamed the Pentagon Papers which showed the real history of U.S involvement in Vietnam, an involvement which directly contradicted what the country had been told was going down. The government knew that if these reports were leaked they’d be through, so they tried to legally restrict the media from publishing the documents. This resulted in the New York Times Co. v. United States case in which it was made illegal for even the President to restrict or censor a news story, even if it contained classified government files, just because it would cause government upset. When the papers were released, people were infuriated because such important information had been hidden from them and it completely ruined the public’s trust in the government, but they were no longer in the dark about shady things being conducted in the name of their country without them knowing.  

Some argue that the price paid in governmental support after the Pentagon Papers were released was too high for the cost of freedom of information. David Putnam argued in his Ted Talk, David Puttnam: Does the Media Have a "Duty of Care"?, that even though it is important for the public to be aware of what is happening, it is more important that our administration has public support and media should be aware of that. He believes that it is more harmful to have a government incapable of getting work done because they are intrusted than it is to have their every mistake critiqued and publicised. He calls for self-censorship in the media and “duty of care” when reporting on governmental affairs. It is his belief that what we don’t know won’t hurt us, but what we do most certainly will. I understand where he is coming from because it's true,  the government can not be competent without the public’s support, but I raise you this question: if a government is in place that has behaved so poorly in public interest that the majority of the country has turned away from them, is that really a government that should continue operating at its current rate? The news is there to keep accountability alive and well and the government’s job is to make decisions on behalf of the people of the United States; at what point does their job become jeopardized by disgracing the public’s opinion? 

It is true that censorship can help get more work done; it can get decisions made faster, and it can determine how effective Presidency is, but at what cost? The censorship during World War II allowed us to gather enough support to fund the war, recruit troops, and get them the food and supplies needed to fight, but it also created a celebration for a massacre that is still hardly discussed in history classes. If we begin asking the media to restrain themselves and to stop telling us when the government isn’t acting in our best interest, than we are essentially handing the government our voices. Once we allow media censorship to take over for, ‘the good of the government,’ we are cutting off the one direct source for the government to gauge public reaction to decisions and actions they make in all of our names; you can only incite change or contribute to public policy if you know what events are taking place. It can not be better to be blind than it is to be critical and questioning. 

Puttnam is not alone, however, in his call for restraint, President Trump believes much the same. Trump has been more than vocal about his opinions of most major media platforms, calling them overly biased and falsely reporting on almost every occasion. He blames the media for the polarity of the two sides of the presidential election and for the negative light he finds himself so regularly cast, claiming it's all media bias making the story look twisted from what it really is. This may be true to some degree, reporters are not immune to their own bias, but neither are the viewers. Shankar Vedantam discussed the effect of the viewers’ bias on a story in his Washington Post article, “Two Views of the Same News Find Opposite Biases.” In this article, he discusses a study in which pro-Israeli and pro-Arab audiences were shown the same news clip regarding violence in the Middle East. The participants were asked to watch the clips and count how many references were in the clip that painted Israel in a positive light and how many references painted Israel unfavorably. Pro-Arab viewers found 42 positive and 26 negative references where pro-Israeli viewers found 16 positive and 57 negative references, even though it was the same clip. This data suggests that regardless of the news story’s bias, the viewer’s bias is going to determine what they draw from a story, therefore it is not entirely the news station’s fault if there stories are perceived one way or the next.

This point begs the question, is President Trump’s solution to ban any and all media he finds to be biased from his announcements, press releases, and any White House press conferences sound, or overkill? Past history shows that taking away access to get media outlets to report in your favor resulted in sloppy reporting and a war that almost no one supported. Restricting major media outlets from accessing major news is just another form of censorship or, if you really look at it, an extreme form of prior restraint. Prior restraint is when the government blocks future action as a preventative measure in response to an event. Prior restraint on the media has been more legally declared as wrong more than censorship, and yet what Trump is doing feels an awful lot like it. Some people don’t care; they argue that if it is, so what? He is preventing the media that is causing upset and hindering governmental progress so he needs to do this in order to do his job. 

If we were to decide that banning press from outgoing information was a form of media censorship, would Trump be legally sound in doing so?  It was ruled in Brandenburg v. Ohio that, "the government can not punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action,” so in order for this form of preventative measure to be legally sounds, the liberal news stations have to be inciting and producing imminent lawless action. Aside from peaceful protests which have taken place, which aren’t even directly tied to these news stories, no ‘imminent lawless action’ has taken place, or shown any signs of occurring. In which case, what President Trump is doing is not just wrong, it is illegal. It is also questionable whether or not his actions back in January after releasing his plans for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines were entirely legal. 

On January 24, President Trump released his plans to develop the controversial Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines. Immediately after releasing these plans, EPA employees received an email from the Trump administration laying out the terms of a media blackout and then enacted a contract freeze which prohibited staff from awarding new grants or contracts, as well as continuing work assignments; this order was published to the EPA’s Federal Register on January 24th and can be reviewed there. This blackout was made known to the public when the National Park Service had a Twitter incident where a disgruntled employee broke the ban to speak out about what was going on. VICE journalist Justin Caffier reported in his article, “Trump Has Barred EPA Staff from Talking to the Press,” that after speaking with Trump's EPA transition leader, Myron Ebell, he was told the bans were, “a normal part of any White House transition.” However, we have never seen a media ban or a complete halt on EPA contracts before, suggesting this is not quite true. This ban is also suggested to have been put into effect to halt EPA contribution to the movement to halt the development of the pipelines as they did during the Obama administration. With this in mind, the fact that one of our most controversial and aggressive presidents ever was releasing executive orders to enact a media blackout for a major governmental organization in order to prevent them from opposing this movement in the first month of his presidency, should be viewed as a sign for what is to come. We have had governments use censorship to get away with things not condoned by the public before; we can’t afford to let that happen again. 

Media censorship is wrong in any account, but the use of blackmail by governing bodies to suppress stories that they don’t like is atrocious. Censorship is, in large part, bad for the public, harmful to our psyche as a nation, and against our legally defined beliefs. Legislation needs to be passed making these kinds of threats illegal. The current laws in place are not thorough enough; the government is not allowed to exercise prior restraint over the media, but they can use backdoor methods of intimidation to force outlets to comply with their restrictions. The media needs to stand up for themselves and to challenge the law the next time these methods are used to silence their voices in order to, hopefully, make all methods of censorship fully illegal. 
