Mediaboss Marketing

Columnist Ali Spies revealed last week in The Standard that her COM 115: Fundamentals of Public Speaking instructor, purportedly acting on instructions of the Department of Communication, rejected her proposal to research, compose and deliver a brief speech about Planned Parenthood in the United States. The instructor asserted that the topic has ... too much controversy ... and implied that, while some controversy might be acceptable, too much controversy is off-limits. Spiess Department of Communication instructor censored Spies. Dr. Shawn T. Wahl heads the MSU Department of Communication.

George Anastaplo, a professor of law at Loyola University in Chicago, wrote that censorship is ... the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good. In other words, our universitys Department of Communication determined before Spies had begun to research her topic that mere mention of the topic would subvert the well-being of our academic community. Without further explanation, we can only speculate in our collective bafflement how the history of Planned Parenthood could possibly subvert the moral or physical welfare of our academic community.

The Department of Communications intellectual tyranny is not unique. A member of the Department of English censored me several semesters ago. In a fiction writing class, I submitted a story that included horrific violence to be discussed and evaluated by my classmates and instructor during our next class.

The instructor inexplicably failed to read the entire piece until just before class, although all of my classmates had read it. Rather than proceed, the instructor blindsided me and told the class that my story was inappropriate for class discussion.

The instructors censorship struck me as particularly hypocritical, given not only the graphic sex and violence in some of the published short stories the instructor had assigned the class to read, but also the instructors reading aloud to the class a lengthy and particularly graphic episode of deviant sex excerpted from one of those assigned short stories. The smug instructors hypocrisy is now part of a successful, if mediocre, academic career.

Given the Department of Communications irrational fear of controversy, its rewriting of Emma Lazaruss sentiment on the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, might well read:

Give me your apathetic, your indolent,

Your texting masses yearning to shop,

The benighted spawn of your vacuous world.

Send these, the complacent, directionless to me,

I lift my middle finger to their delusive dreams!

Censorship at a university is an abuse of power and a corruption of authority; it is a tool of bullies and despots whose victims are never the same. This toxic silencing stunts the intellectual growth of students and abuses them to such a degree that, out of paranoia, they self-correct whenever they feel theyve entered uncharted territory. They fear rocking the boat; their souls are crippled and their respect for instructors of all ranks becomes wary and stressful.

If Einstein had been intimidated effectively by mediocre instructors, would it have delayed special relativity or general relativity? If incompetent, self-hating instructors had strong-armed Lincoln, would he have authored the Emancipation Proclamation? Is it unreasonable to hope that theres a special place in Hell for I darent eat a peach instructors who hog-tie youths exuberant and yeasty passions for learning?

Whether the above incidents of censorship are anomalies or part and parcel of university dry-rot and mediocrity needs to be investigated, but first, Missouri State President Clif Smart and Wahl each needs to apologize to Spies for permitting censorship to exist on their collective watch. Since Spiess experience is now quite public, both Smarts and Wahls apologies should also be public; our academic community demands redress.

Continued here:
Censorship: Is it happening at MSU? - Standard Online

No China release date for the fifthPiratesfilm has been announced yet.

Disneys Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales has been approved for cinemas in China, according to sources familiar with the matter, but a release date is yet to be announced.

Directed by Joachim Rnning and Espen Sandberg, the film marks the third time the franchise has made it to what is now the worlds second-largest entertainment market.

A decade ago, Pirates Of The Caribbean: At Worlds End was the first of the series to show in China and ended up earning RMB 125 million (USD$18.1 million). In 2011, Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides pulled in RMB 476 million ($69 million).

Earlier this month it was announced that all of the previous installments in the franchise will screen in the out of competition section of this years Beijing International Film Festival the first clear sign the newest film would also make it to the Chinese market.

The film sees Johnny Depp return as Captain Jack Sparrow as he is chased down by a group of deadly ghost pirates lead by new arch-nemesis Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem).

While a China release date is yet to be announced, the film is confirmed to be coming out in North America on May 26.

The impending release in China will no doubt help bolster attendance at the Shanghai Disney Resort, which opened in June 2016.

The resort has become an obligatory stop for stars of Disney films since it opened. Late last month the cast of Beauty and the Beast including Emma Watson, Dan Stevens, Luke Evans, Kevin Kline, and Josh Gad met fans at the resort ahead of its release on March 17.

The resort received close to 8 million visitors in the first nine months since opening last year, according to Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger.

About the author Fergus Ryan has worked in media, communications and marketing roles in China and Australia for close to a decade. Most recently, Fergus was a journalist for the News Corp. publications China Spectator and The Australian. He has also been published in The Guardian and Foreign Policy. Prior to that, Fergus worked on business development for the A-list star Li Bingbing at Huayi Brothers, and on celebrity engagement and social media for the WWF and DMG Entertainment.

Go here to see the original:
'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales' Passes China Censorship - China Film Insider

Southlands Sun

#HandsOffSocialMedia as 'internet censorship' bill booed Southlands Sun It comes on the back of a range of existing, deeply problematic censorship policies, including the Film and Publication Board's internet censorship regulations, the draft Hate Speech Bill, and the new Cybercrimes Bill, which would 'hand the keys of ...

See the original post:
#HandsOffSocialMedia as 'internet censorship' bill booed - Southlands Sun

By Justus Leicht 24 March 2017

Under the pretext of combatting fake news and hate speech on the internet, Justice Minister Heiko Maas (Social Democratic Party, SPD) is planning a massive attack on free speech.

On March 14, Maas presented a draft of a so-called network enforcement law (NetzDG), which imposes extensive surveillance and censorship responsibilities on commercial social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. If the draft becomes law, such sites will be required to react immediately to complaints and block obviously illegal content within 24 hours. Other illegal content must be erased within seven days.

The corporations will have to decide on their own what is illegal and, to this end, they will have to set up a contact office in Germany. The law would turn them into investigators, judges and executioners over free speech, as the platform Netzpolitik.org writes.

If they do not live up to their duty to delete content, they are threatened with draconian fines of up to 50 million. These fines are left to the discretion of the Federal Office of Justice and can be imposed even in the case of a single offense, regardless of whether it is intentional or the result of negligence.

The law would apply to social networks that have at least 2 million users registered in Germany. However, the definition of a social network is so broadly formulated that, in addition to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, other services such as Whatsapp and Skype, and even larger email providers and file hosting sites, could fall under its purview.

The providers would be required not only to delete content, but also all copies of it, and would have to prevent it from being uploaded once again. At the same time, the content would have to be saved, possibly indefinitely, for evidentiary purposes.

The provider would be required to inform the user about the deletion and would be required to justify the decision, but a multiple choice justification form would suffice. If the user does not agree with the deletion, he would have to spend months, or even years, on costly legal proceedings. During this time, the deletion would remain in force.

The draft legislation includes more than a dozen clauses whose violation would lead to deletion. In addition to open calls to commit crimes and related offenses, it lists libel, defamation, slander, disparagement of the German president, and insults to religious communities.

As the Berlin law professor Niko Hrting remarked, the law is about unlawful and not punishable content. He insists that this is an important difference. Hrting fears that the law will lead to a situation in which the scope of criminal prohibitions will be expanded considerably, and that the new law will make it much easier to forbid certain statements.

Whether a statement is insulting, disparaging or defamatory has often been the object of a lengthy process of legal dispute. Not infrequently, charges and court actions have been employed in an effort to criminalize and silence personal and political opponents. The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has repeatedly, though not always consistently, come to decisions that emphasized the value of free speech.

A well-known example is a decision of the Federal Constitutional Court in 1995. It decided that the statement by the German-Jewish journalist, satirist and writer that soldiers are murderers does not constitute libel, and it authored a decision to this effect. The legal dispute over the poem by the satirist Jan Bhmermann about Turkish President Erdogan is ongoing.

The extremely short inspection period combined with the threat of draconian fines makes it likely that corporations like Facebook or Google will react to reports of supposedly criminal content by erring on the side of caution and deleting it. Every sharp, critical, polemic, ironic or satirical post on a social network would vanish in no time.

The internet and the social networks on which people publicly voice and exchange views independently of the official political institutions, parties and media, have long been a thorn in the side of the ruling elite, which views the right to freedom of speech as a threat.

The draft legislation addresses this quite openly. Hate criminalityaccording to this law almost everythingthat cannot be combatted and pursued effectively, threatens peaceful coexistence in a free, open and democratic society, it says. Then the American election is openly invoked as an example: After the experience in the US election, the combatting of punishable false reports (fake news) has also won high priority in Germany.

To this end, corporations valued in the billions will be tasked with suppressing disagreeable statements and opinions. A lengthy court process, in which a decision in favour of free speech might be reached once again, will be replaced with a short process: a report, followed by deletion and justification by multiple choice.

Several critical journalists have also noted that the real concern of the Justice Minister is the suppression of free speech and criticism. Harald Martenstein wrote an article for Tagesspiegel, Where the government decides what is truth and what is fake, we are in despotism. But precisely now, while we are still excited about Erdogan, Erdogan methods are being prepared here in this country. Justice Minister Heiko Maas has presented draft legislation that reads as though it came from the novel 1984.

On the other hand, representatives of the two ruling parties, the SPD and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), welcomed the planned legislation. Moreover, in the view of the Green Party, which is an opposition party to the government, the law does not go far enough.

Green Party parliamentary representative, Renate Knast, who is the president of the Parliamentary Committee for Law and Consumer Protection, told the German radio station Deutschlandfunk that it is a problem that the draft legislation only covers punishable content! She also wants to suppress free speech that is explicitly not punishable.

Knast left no room for doubt that for her the point of the law is to silence oppositional voices in the population: With 30 million Facebook users in Germany, all of this vulgar behaviour, even when it is not punishable, has an impact on real and virtual life. It has an influence. Even mayors are resigning because they are being molested.

In addition, she advocated viewing social media providers like newspapers and radio stations, which are made directly responsible for the content they bring to the public. This would lead in effect to a comprehensive review of all content and self-censorship in advance of publication rather than afterwards.

The legislation proposed by Justice Minister Maas and the criticism of it by former Green Party Minister of the Environment Knast are indicative of the attitude to basic democratic rights of a future red-red-green federal coalition government. Such a government would not have the slightest interest in defending democratic principles.

Visit link:
German justice minister proposes internet censorship legislation ... - World Socialist Web Site

A new book by University of Wyoming professor Jeff Lockwood explores the role of corporate wealth in censoring speech and expression, and he got his inspiration from a campus incident several years ago.

Behind the Carbon Curtain: The Energy Industry, Political Censorship and Free Speech, is set to be released in April by University of New Mexico Press. A book launch party is scheduled for 1-3 p.m. April 1 at Second Story Books, 105 Ivinson Ave.

Lockwood directs the UW Creative Writing Program with a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy. He said he first began considering the ideas central to his book in 2012.

A sculpture called Carbon Sink by artist Chris Drury was installed in 2011 on the UW campus south of Old Main, near the intersection of 10th Street and Ivinson Avenue. The circular, ground-level sculpture consisted of a 36-foot-wide whirlpool of beetle-killed logs, with a charred center.

The sculpture was removed the following year, a year ahead of schedule. In an essay written for WyoFile, Lockwood accused the UW administration of caving to pressure from politicians and the energy industry to have the sculpture removed because it drew a connection between fossil fuels, climate change and the bark beetle epidemic.

I was very concerned with the collusion of corporate power and political power to destroy art, he said.

Emails obtained by Wyoming Public Radio suggest former President Tom Buchanan ordered the sculpture to be removed because of the controversy it generated.

Following his public protest, Lockwood began hearing from residents elsewhere in the state about similar occurrences at museums and institutions of higher education.

The people who were telling me these stories were not often in positions where they had the necessary protection, he said.

Lockwood said his position as a tenured professor gives him an opportunity to tell stories others cant.

I was given the incredible privilege of tenure by the people of Wyoming, and that comes with a very serious responsibility, which is to tell the truth as I understand it, and to do that in a fearless way, he said.

Behind the Carbon Curtain documents those stories, as Lockwood argues the energy industry uses economic pressure to suppress the expression of ideas that run counter to its economic interests.

Lockwood said Wyoming offers a particularly clear lens into the relationship between the energy industry and the government because of the states small size and its dependence on a single industry.

But its not as if its not happening in other places, he said. Its just clearer here.

He points to similar stories in states such as Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.

In a broader sense, I make the case that Wyoming is a microcosm of whats happening around the country, Lockwood said.

And its not just a problem of the energy industry, either, Lockwood argues.

The relationship between corporate wealth and political power, to me, is probably the single-most insidious and most dangerous phenomenon in American democracy, he said.

He hopes the book generates concern among readers and spurs them to action. He stressed he doesnt consider his argument to be limited to a single political party. For example, censorship on college campuses has multiple sources.

The First Amendment is fundamental to the health of the future of the country, he said. This is something we all share in.

Lockwood joined the UW faculty 30 years as an entomologist in the College of Agriculture. He has written nonfiction books about philosophy and entomology as well as a crime noir novel.

See the article here:
New book by professor explores censorship - Laramie Boomerang