Word: censorship
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ONCE AGAIN, disgruntled artists are crying "Censorship!" in order to discredit the concept of moral standards in art. Four artists whose grant applications to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were recently rejected have filed a lawsuit against the organization's "decency code," which forbids the funding of works of art and literature that depict homosexuality or the erotic. They claim that the code was the reason for their rejection and that it sets an unconstitutional limit on freedom of expression...
Unlike Malevich, Liubov Popova died young -- scarlet fever got her in 1924, before Stalin's purges could. She was only 35. At least she was spared the miseries of censorship and persecution visited on other Russian avant-gardists by Stalin. Moreover, she died at a time when it was still possible for an idealistic, exuberantly gifted young artist like herself to believe in the promise of Leninism. Her last works, such as the 1923 collage stage design for a play about the revolution called Earth in Turmoil -- showing a helmeted aviator, prototype of the new Soviet Man, gazing...
...news about the war was carefully managed in a variety of ways. By herding reporters into pools, subjecting their stories to censorship and imposing other restrictions like the total news blackout at the start of the ground war, the Pentagon claimed it was making sure no confidential military information was revealed. The restrictions, however, gave the military a major say in where journalists could go and what they could report. A ban on showing pictures of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base, for example, was aimed at softening the coverage of U.S. casualties...
During the Vietnam War, the media observed a strict, self-imposed censorship which downplayed the savage nature of that war. Members of the media absolutely refused to question administration policy--at least until very late in the war, when most Americans supported withdrawal anyway. The reasons ranged from fear of offending the parents of soldiers to conservatism among the network brass. But after Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, a more cynical press emerged--one that was unwilling to cotton to the government's requests for non-critical reporting...
WARS ARE NOT won and lost on the television screen. Members of the media have been trying to prove this to the American military for years, and they should continue to insist that their coverage of Vietnam did not prevent the U.S. from winning that war. Combatting unnecessary censorship in the Gulf and in future conflicts should not involve turning to Vietnam as the perfect example of an uncensored war. This only makes the press's accusations as absurd as the military...