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Pictures are powerful. What we see (and what we dont) shapes our worldview. So whos controlling the filter? How do mediaoutlets decide what to show, and what to blur out? And how doyou know if what youre seeing is real?

Amanda St. Hilaire, Dennis Owens, and guest-host Amanda Peterson discuss these issuesand how they affect families (especially children). They also talk about a new effort to showcase the hidden gems in your neighborhood, and read the comments and questions you sent in during the week.

Subscribe to On Deadline in iTunes or Google Play Music to get episodes automatically delivered to your electronic device each week. You can also listen on Stitcher, TuneIn,or in the player below:

Write a review, send us an email, or message us on Facebook to share your thoughts or suggest a topic for discussion.

Below are links and references from this weeks episode:

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Getting the real story: Censorship in the digital age - ABC27

A profile in The College Voice, the student newspaper of Connecticut College,ofan activist-turned-artist named Mike Alewitz details his radical, politically charged career that is characterizedas muchbythe provocative works heproduced as bythe incidents of censorship theworks inspired.

Alewitz, aformer professor atCentral CT State University,who earned his MFA from theMassachusetts College of Art in 1983, is best known for his murals depicting the American labor movement. According to the profile author, his "stories are a routine of acceptance and decline, of struggle and movement. His pieces are vibrant, loud, colorful. They declare to be acknowledged."

In the profile, Alewitz, now in his 60s, tellsthe story of his life's work through a tour of his Connecticut home, identified "by its fiery red exterior and vibrant pink detail," where he sits at his dining table accompanied bya make-up smeared mannequin and a "large, plastic bunny with long white ears."

His story begins as an undergraduate at Kent State University, where his witnessing of the Kent State massacrefurthered his motivationas an anti-warorganizer. At the time of the massacrehe was the university'sChairman of the Student Mobilization Committee Against the War (SMC). After the shooting,

he left to become an organizer for anti-war movements, traveling to Austin, Los Angeles, Cleveland, New Orleans, Virginia, Boston, New Jersey. At the time he began working for the union movement, he was in industry as a railroad worker and machinist. He even laid some of the railroad tracks in New London, Connecticut that remain about half a mile from his house. While working, Alewitz picked up sign painting and billboard painting before going to the Massachusetts School of Art in his late thirties. He considers this the beginning of his art career. I had the background, he tells me. I could render.

As an MFA student, Alewitz had his first encounter with the censorship of his work. A column he painted in tribute to a local back man killed by the police was subsequently graffitied by the police and then painted over by the authorities. Since then, the profile explains, "Alewitz has been devoted to agitprop work, a combination of agitation and propaganda, which he also refers to as 'high grade street art'."

Alewitz garnereda reputation for works that paid tribute to labor groups, such as the International Confederation of Energy and Mine Workers and UNITE The Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees, murals that reflected his political perspective;his sense of antipathy toward the capitalist system. The author notes that an adjacent room in his house is lined with booksKarl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Lenin.

Yeah, hetells the profile writer,Im the real deal.

According to the profile, Alewitz keeps boxes of press articles about incidents of censorship his works have produced. In 1999, for example, he was funded to produce a series of muralscalled Dreams of Harriet Tubman. The central mural he painted "shows Harriet Tubman holding a gun and on either side of her are red swirling waves. Silhouettes of people cluster and crowd at her feet." The mural was never made public, however:

Youre in a place where there are statues with white men with guns everywhere and they cant his voice trails off as he tells me the story. I painted the only image of a womana Black womanwith a gun. After the mural was rejected, Alewitz issued an offer for a free mural but no one would provide a wall. Everybodys afraid, he says. It was censorship and not the kind that helps your career.

Alewitzs history with censorship iswell known to NCAC.In 2014, for example, the Museum of the City of New Yorkrefused to display his mural at the inaugural exhibition of the museums Puffin Gallery for Social Activism.Despite the overtly left-leaning politics of the Puffin Foundation,which commissioned the mural for theireponymous gallery, the museum was reluctant to be associated with the murals unvarnished, left-wing, pro-labor views.NCAC urged the museum and the foundation to open a dialogue about how this mural, which depicts the struggles of radical labor and civil rights movements in our society, can be presented to the public.

Read the rest of the interview withThe College Voice, which takes the readerthrough Alewitzs house and studio, floor by floor, mural by mural, story by story. As the profile writer comments:

There is a book in every one of these stories, he says. [] There are novels behind his paintings and behind those novels are history books. His house is a time capsule.

Summer Wrobels interview with Mike Alewitz, The House on Federal Street: Meet New Londons Resident Censored Artist, appeared in The College Voice on April 4, 2017. Read the full piece here.Take a tour through one of Alewitzs mural proposals here.

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An Art Career Intertwined with Censorship: The Murals of Mike Alewitz - Blogging Censorship (blog)

All who cherish free expression, especially on campuses, must combat the growing zeal for censorship.

By Heather Mac Donald, The City Journal

Where are the faculty? American college students are increasingly resorting to brute force, and sometimes criminal violence, to shut down ideas they dont like. Yet when such travesties occur, the faculty are, with few exceptions, missing in action, though they have themselves been given the extraordinary privilege of tenure to protect their own liberty of thought and speech. It is time for them to take their heads out of the sand.

I was the target of such silencing tactics two days in a row last week, the more serious incident at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, and a less virulent one at UCLA.

The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students and to give a talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to shut down this notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald. A Facebook post from we, students of color at the Claremont Colleges announced grandiosely that as a community, we CANNOT and WILL NOT allow fascism to have a platform. We stand against all forms of oppression and we refuse to have Mac Donald speak. A Facebook event titled Shut Down Anti-Black Fascist Heather Mac Donald and hosted by Shut Down Anti-Black Fascists encouraged students to protest the event because Mac Donald condemns [the] Black Lives Matter movement, supports racist police officers, and supports increasing fascist law and order. (My supposed fascism consists in trying to give voice to the thousands of law-abiding minority residents of high-crime areas who support the police and are desperate for more law-enforcement protection.)

The event organizers notified me a day before the speech that a protest was planned and that they were considering changing the venue from CMCs Athenaeum to one with fewer glass windows and easier egress. When I arrived on campus, I was shuttled to what was in effect a safe house: a guest suite for campus visitors, with blinds drawn.

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Mac Donald: Time to Fight Alt-Left Censorship on Campus - Fox News

Just a few years ago, Russians had a mostly free Internet, but now, authorities are trying to imitate Chinas model of government control.

By Emily Parker

When you hear the words Russia and Internet, you probably think of Kremlin-backed hacking. But the Internet is also a powerful tool for President Vladimir Putins opposition. Last month, the Internet helped spark Russias largest anti-government protests in five years. Russia responded by blocking access to websites that promoted demonstrations.

This is part of a larger story. Just a few years ago, Russians had a mostly free Internet. Now, Russian authorities would like to imitate Chinas model of Internet control. They are unlikely to succeed. The Kremlin will find that, once you give people Internet freedom, its not so easy to completely take it away.

I lived in Moscow in 2010 after spending years researching Internet activism in China. I quickly found that Russia and China had very different attitudes toward the Web. The Great Firewall of China blocked overseas sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. In Russia, by contrast, you could find almost any information online. This was largely because Russian authorities didnt view the Internet as a serious political threat. That changed in late 2011 and early 2012, when Moscow was the site of the largest anti-government protests since the end of the Soviet Union. Social media helped organize those demonstrations, and Putin took note. A law that took effect in late 2012, to give just one example, granted Russian authorities the power to block certain online content.

Moscow clearly admires Beijings approach. Last year, former Chinese Internet czar Lu Wei and Great Firewall architect Fang Binxing were invited to speak at a forum on Internet safety. The Russians were apparently hoping to learn Chinese techniques for controlling the Web. Russia has already taken a page or two from Chinas playbook. While Facebook and Twitter remain accessible in Russia, at least for now, a Russian court ruled to ban LinkedIn, apparently for breaking rules that require companies to store personal data about Russian citizens inside the country. This could be a warning to companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook, which risk being blocked in Russia if they refuse to follow such rules.

Both Russia and China have made clear that they wish to regulate the Internet as they see fit, without outside interference. Chinese President Xi Jinping has stressed the importance of Internet sovereignty, which essentially means that individual countries should have the right to choose their own model of cyber governance. Putin has taken this idea one step further by calling the Internet a CIA project. By this logic, Russia needs to proactively protect its own interests in the information sphere whether by cracking down on online dissent or using the Internet to spread its own version of events.

Russia Internet expert Andrei Soldatov, author of the book The Red Web, says the Kremlin certainly looks for something close to the China approach these days, mostly because many other things failedfiltering is porous, global platforms defy local legislation, and are still available. Soldatov says that the government would like to have direct control of critical infrastructure such as the national system of domain distribution, Internet exchange points, and cables that cross borders. He adds that this approach, which may not even be successful, would be more of an emergency measure than a realistic attempt to regulate the Internet on a day-to-day basis.

Chinas method has worked because Beijing has long recognized the Internet as both an economic opportunity and a political threat. Chinas isolated Internet culture has given rise to formidable domestic companies. It was once easy to dismiss Chinas local technology players as mere copycatsSina Weibo imitating Twitter, Baidu imitating Google, and so on. But now, some of these companies, notably Tencents WeChat, have become so formidable that we may soon see Western companies imitating them. In the meantime, Chinese Internet users arent necessarily longing for their Western competitors.

In Russia, however, American sites like YouTube have become very powerful. The recent demonstrations were in part sparked by an online report by opposition leader and anti-corruption blogger Alexey Navalny, who alleged that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev had amassed a fortune in yachts, mansions, and estates. Navalnys video on YouTube, viewed more than 16 million times, detailed this alleged corruption. Navalny called for protests after his demands for investigating official corruption was denied by the Russian parliament. According to Global Voices, the Russian prosecutors office recently requested the blocking of a YouTube video calling on young people to rally.

Russian blogger Elia Kabanov believes that YouTube is now too big to block. I doubt the Kremlin will go there, he said. They blocked LinkedIn mostly because it was a niche site in Russia and nobody cared. And of course the government propaganda machine is using YouTube a lot, so it wouldnt make any sense to block it. If they try to take down protest announcements on platforms on YouTube, Kabanov says, new ones will appear. I really cant see the way for the Kremlin to implement the Chinese model now: Everything is too connected, their own agencies are using all these services.

Russia does have its own domestic social networks, of course. VKontakte (VK), for example, is far more influential than Facebook. Soldatov notes that VK played an unusually big role in the recent protests. But Facebook still has a devoted Russian following, especially among political activists.

According to Soldatov:

No government can entirely control the flow of information. Even in China, those determined to find information can find a tool, say a virtual private network, to jump over the firewall. Russian censors will face a similar challenge. In recent years, there has been an ongoing increase in Russian use of Tor, a browser that can be used to circumvent censorship. As a 2015 Global Voices article noted, the increase in censorship closely mirrors the upward trend in interest towards Tor.

In the short term Russian street protests may fizzle out, especially as Moscow cracks down on dissent. But the story wont end there. The Internet on its own will not cause a revolution in Russia, but it can be an effective tool for organization. Beijing figured this out a long time ago, but the Kremlin is learning it too late.

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Russia Is Copying China's Approach to Internet Censorship Will It Work? - Pacific Standard

A censorship watchdog has warned that novels by shamed comedian Bill Cosby are vanishing from school libraries.

Educators are perhaps unsurprisingly uncomfortable with the idea of their pupils reading titles from Cosbys Little Bill series after numerous rape allegations him.

The American Library Association named the books among its annual list of titles at risk of being censored, placing it 9th in the top 10.

Bills adventures have been much-loved reading tools for years, and were also the basis for an Emmy-winning Nickelodeon cartoon series.

However, the titles have clearly taken on the taint of scandal since scores of women began making allegations of sexual assault against Cosby.

The comedian is due to stand trial later this year in Pennsylvania on claims that he drugged and molested a student at Temple University in 2004.

Claims by many other women stretch back beyond the statute of limitations, so are unlikely ever to be contested in court, but have been aired extensively in the media.

Officials at the ALA said the turn against the titles was remarkable because it was not based on what is in the books, but the person who wrote them.

James LaRue, who leads the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, told CNN: I think its our fascination with celebrity. If we love the person we love everything about him.

If we hate the person we hate everything about him. We dont seem to be able to separate the message from the messenger.

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Censorship Watchdog: Bill Cosby's Books for Kids Are Vanishing From Schools - Heat Street