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Corporate censorship

Censorship by corporations

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By industry

E-commerce and technology

Corporate censorship in the E-commerce and technology industry is usually the explicit or implicit ban or suppression of certain material by a tech company from the product it offers. Earlier in 2018, Bloomberg reported that Google and Amazon are involved in a case of Russian censorship of a Russian company called Telegram. After Russian intelligence Federal Security Service (FSB) attempted to gain access to and found terrorist messages on Telegram, a messenger service in Russia with 15 million users, the app was banned by a Moscow court. In April 2018, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were thanked by Telegram's founder for "not taking part in political censorship". It is said that Google and Amazon were thanked because they were possibly engaged in domain fronting, a technique that circumvents Internet censorship. However, things later changed as Google and Amazon disabled domain fronting and helped in the Russian censors' endeavor.

Art and music

Corporate censorship in the music industry involves the censorship of musicians' artistic works by the refusal to market or to distribute them. One example given by Jay is that of Ice-T altering the lyrics of "Cop Killer" as a result of the pressure applied to Time Warner by William Bennett along with various religious and advocacy groups.

The 2012 PEN World Voices Festival focused on corporate censorship in the publishing industry with Salman Rushdie, author of Satanic Verses, tackling censorship as "anti-creation". Giannina Braschi, author of United States of Banana, offered a critique of 21st century capitalism in which she condemned corporate censorship as financial control. Braschi declared: "Nobody owns a work of art, not even the artist."

DeeDee Halleck opines that describing the corporate censorship of independent artists, which she notes is often less overt in form, as self-censorship "smacks of blaming the victim". She describes such self-censorship as being simply a survival stratagem, the tailoring of an artist's choices to what is acceptable to those in power, based upon widespread knowledge of the acceptable themes and formats at institutions such as (her examples) the Public Broadcasting Service, the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibits gallery, or the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art.

Journalism, media, and entertainment

Croteau and Hoynes discuss corporate censorship in the news publishing business, observing that it can occur as self-censorship. They note that it is "virtually impossible to document", because it is covert. Jonathan Alter states that "In a tight job market, the tendency is to avoid getting yourself or your boss in trouble. So an adjective gets dropped, a story skipped, a punch pulled … It's like that Sherlock Holmes story – the dog that didn't bark. Those clues are hard to find." The head of the Media Access Project notes that such self-censorship is not misreporting or false reporting, but simply not reporting at all. Self-censorship is not the product of "dramatic conspiracies", according to Croteau and Hoynes, but simply the interaction of many small daily decisions. Journalists want to keep their jobs and editors support the interests of the company. These many small actions and non-actions accumulate to produce (in their words) "homogenized, corporate-friendly media".

Nichols and McChesney opine that "the maniacal media baron as portrayed in James Bond films or profiles of Rupert Murdoch is far less a danger than the cautious and compromised editor who seeks to 'balance' a responsibility to readers or viewers with a duty to serve his boss and the advertisers". They state that "even among journalists who entered the field for the noblest of reasons" there is a tendency to avoid any controversial journalism that might embroil the news company in a battle with a powerful corporation or a government agency. They observe that although such conflicts "have always been the stuff of great journalism" they are "very bad business", and that "in the current climate business trumps journalism just about every time".

Croteau and Hoynes report that such corporate censorship in journalism is commonplace, reporting the results of studies revealing that more than 40% of journalists and news executives stating that they had deliberately engaged in such censorship by avoiding newsworthy stories or softening the tones of stories. More than a third of the respondents stated that news organizations would ignore news that might hurt their financial interests. A similar fraction stated that they self-censored in order to further, or not endanger, their careers.

Specific case: Westway project

Halleck states that journalists are well aware of where self-censorship is required, and what they have to say or not say in their stories in order to keep their jobs. She gives Sydney Schanberg as an example. A high-profile, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Schanberg breached corporate censorship when reporting on corruption in New York City with regard to the Westway project. In Schanberg's column in The New York Times he asked why the Times was not investigating the issues, and was subsequently laid off. Halleck notes that the negative feedback that enforces corporate censorship is usually not as well documented as in the case of Schanberg, nor as clear-cut. Corporations may change the assignments of problem journalists, accept fewer stories from them, downgrade their office space, or deny them raises.

Self-censorship is not the only form of corporate censorship in the news and entertainment businesses. Croteau and Hoynes also describe managers censoring their employees, subdivisions of conglomerates applying pressure upon one another, and pressure applied upon corporations by external entities such as advertisers. They note that many incidents of corporate censorship are "unlikely to become public", but give the following (and several other) case studies of incidents of corporate censorship that have become part of the public record:

  • The decision by the Walt Disney Company to prevent Miramax from releasing Fahrenheit 911 in 2004. (See Fahrenheit 9/11 controversy.) Croteau and Hoynes observe that this was a business decision, and state that "even when such business decisions are not politically motivated, then can have substantial political consequences".
  • The decision in 1998 by HarperCollins to drop plans for publishing East and West, the memoirs of Chris Patten, out of concern it might affect the relationship between Star TV and the Chinese government. (Milner, who also cites this decision as an example, places them both alongside the decision by HarperCollins not to publicize Michael Moore's Stupid White Men and observes that Patten, as a member of the U.K. Conservative Party, demonstrates corporate censorship is not confined to left-wing writers such as Moore.)

An example given by Henry of censorship by a corporation rather than by a government is the censorship in May 2004 by The Sinclair Broadcasting Group of an issue of ABC News' Nightline entitled "The Fallen" wherein Ted Koppel recited the names and showed the faces of all Americans killed in action in Iraq. Sinclair, a strong proponent of the U.S. actions in Iraq, prohibited the six ABC affiliates that it owned from broadcasting the show, on the grounds that the program was "motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq". (See Sinclair Broadcast Group#Nightline reading of the names and Nightline#Reading of the names.)

Milner also notes, in addition, the list of songs circulated by Clear Channel Communications, and the 2003 ban on the Dixie Chicks (see Clear Channel Communications#September 11.2C 2001 and Dixie Chicks#Political controversy), stating his inference that "these relatively public actions are merely the tip of a veritable iceberg of corporate censorship", and arguing that publishers are "by no means passive conduits for the transmission of cultural products from producers to consumers" but are influenced to take an active rôle in that transmission by motives of profit, ideology, values, or even reasons of state.

Major corporations such as Walmart are also responsible for such acts. They refuse to sell musical CDs produced by artists which contain parental advisory stickers on them to their customers. Because of this, artists who want to reach out to Walmart customers with their music need to change and edit their songs without any profanity in order for them to be put on shelves.

Media conglomeration

One of the incidents of corporate censorship that Croteau and Hoynes find to be "the most disturbing" in their view is the news reporting in the U.S. of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which made fundamental changes to the limitations on ownership of media conglomerates within the U.S. and which was heavily lobbied for by media interests, and yet which was subject to, in Croteau and Hoynes' words, "remarkably little coverage" by U.S. news media. They report one study that found that in the nine months between the introduction of the bill into Congress and its passage in February 1996, there were only 12 major stories, comprising 19.5 minutes of air time, about the Act on the three major U.S. television networks, with much of this coverage focussing upon television content ratings and the V-chip and "largely ignor[ing]" the major changes to the media ownership rules. Croteau and Hoynes observe that history repeated itself with the 2003 review by the FCC of the media ownership rules, with a study by American Journalism Review concluding that the plan to alter the ownership regulations in favor of "a handful of large companies" was "barely mentioned" by most newspapers and broadcast outlets that were owned by those companies.

Croteau and Hoynes state that this "inadequate" coverage of the legislation and FCC actions suggests a built-in conflict of interest for news media – one that is not just limited to television and radio news media, given that many newspapers are also owned by the same corporations that own the television and radio stations. Reporting fully the views of critics of the legislation would have been counter to the economic interests of the news media companies which benefited directly from the legislation, lobbied in its favour, and even helped to draft it. This conflict of interest was observed by John McCain during debate of the Telecommunications Act in the U.S. Senate, who stated that "You will not see this story on any television or hear it on any radio broadcast because it directly affects them." Sohn similarly observed, in a 1998 critique of the deregulation by the Telecommunications Act, that increased concentration of media ownership "often leads to a type of corporate censorship by which information affecting the large media company's economic interest is kept from the public's eyes and ears".

Nichols and McChesney similarly observe that the exclusion of Ralph Nader from the three presidential debates in the 2000 presidential race by television networks guaranteed that the debates would not address controversial issues of media conglomeration. They note with irony that this was seemingly against the self-interests of the television stations, since it served to also reduce public interest in the televised presidential debates by rendering them, in their view, "duller than dirt agreeathons" that viewers would not be interested in watching.

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