Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his famous Democracy in America that a newspaper can exist only if reflecting views and concepts shared by a certain community. In this sense, it is invariably a mouthpiece of a certain association whose members form its regular readership.
Censorship is one of the tools of self-defense applied by all political or market operators in their power plays. It is important to understand that censorship is employed even by volunteer organizations saying that outlawing it is among their statutory objectives. The notion of censorship is thus to be clearly distinguished from all restrictions imposed in conjunction with ideological pursuits, promotional techniques, or rules of inside political games. Censorship, therefore, means deliberate concealment (by the government) of any such information from the general public (e.g., from the media) as may have a significant effect on the decision-making process and on the level of public support of it within democracies and weak authoritarian regimes.
Why has the subject of censorship remained relevant, never failing to attract broad public interest? One of the reasons, in my opinion, is because it would be hard to mention a single government or country where this problem has never emerged — however obvious or devious the association and implication. Let us refer ourselves to hard facts.
We all know that the tax levied on cigarettes and tobacco is a major revenue item in the US federal budget. Several years ago, an employee of a company run by a magnate in the field decided to get it off his chest in an interview with CBS, telling about the actual findings on the hazards of smoking. He was fired for disclosing commercial secrets and the company used intermediaries to get the channel under control. The government had looked the other way all the while, taking an easily understandable stand.
Not so long ago, the government of a country in northern Europe had to resign because it had kept its peacemaking contingent in Yugoslavia secret from the general public for years. This one could be considered evidence, however controversial, of progress being made by campaigning for public access to the need-to-know domain. After all, the Dutch are still holding back details of the assassination of the right extremist leader and candidate premier Pim Fortein; US environmentalists have spent decades fighting to have classified data on domestic nuclear power accidents made public knowledge with little progress.
Everyone more or less read in history and using common sense realizes that there is one chance out of a hundred to access political secrets jealously kept by the government machine. Therefore, let us consider the subject at a different angle, namely political necessity.
The record of the information policy in any country is a record of ongoing struggle between the priorities of short-lived truth and those of medium-term stability. In most civilized polities, long-term reconciliation gets the upper hand.
The tobacco tax is potentially capable of securing progress in medicine, providing for an easier access to health care. To a physician, this sounds cynical, that of the devil’s advocate, yet we try to figure out things like politicians. What could any kind of evidence supplied by an insider actually change? Self-sufficient decision-makers would continue to make their decisions; those dependent on others’ decisions would remain on the losing side.
If the Dutch learned that Fortein had actually been assassinated by an Arab extremist, rather than an animal-lover, this would secure the Nazi victory in the first place, making cozy Holland follow in troubled America’s footsteps; a couple of years later, FBI agents would burst into New Havana (Miami) and wallop US citizens with their clubs to make them let go of the boy whom Bill Clinton had decided to return to Fidel Castro contrary to law. A disastrous situation with a peacekeeping contingent can frighten any given country from any such further UN projects, meaning that a decision can play a tragic role in history.
Censorship is one of the major aspects of social progress, a battlefield where the age-old notion of political necessity combats individual freedom. Here individual freedom is raised over and above the growing welfare of society, rather quickly degrading, turning into banal market demand. Here sensations become another commodity. Thus it would be a bad mistake to unquestioningly include the right of the public to know everything there is to know into the underlying principles of fair government, including democracy. So long as we have society, we shall have government and the attendant political necessity. From this flows the importance of grading the criteria of censorship rather than attacking censorship as such.
If you conceal a nuclear disaster, you are certainly a criminal. If you conceal the true meaning of a cabinet appointment, you are a politician acting at your own discretion. If you keep a politician’s private life away from the public eye, you are a modern civilized individual.
The fact remains, however, that secrets are hard to keep in the industrialized countries, for here the media plays the key role and Ukraine is no exception. Here the ideological orientation of a given publication comes first. Take several examples to explain my point.
If you want to have your article carried by The New York Times, you are not likely to write about Osama bin Laden’s heroic youth among the Afghan anti-Communists.
If you want to get room on the pages of the Al Jazair it’s best not to compare the Crusader Bush to the one historically known as Richard the Lion Heart.
Likewise, you will not send an analysis of the privatization process in St. Petersburg under Mayor Anatoly Sobchak to the Russian Izvestiya.
If you try to have your article carried by the Polish Kultura, you will have to reckon with the editors’ favorable attitude toward the Self-Defense leader Andrzej Lepper.
The Ukrainian PiK will surely shelve your article about the benefits of Ukrainian-Russian economic integration.
The Ukrainian 2000 will not publish your article about the positive role being played by the current US ambassador in the development of Ukrainian democracy.
All this will happen because every media takes a certain political stand, including the Komanda [Team, a popular Ukrainian sports periodical] or Suputnyk Domashnioho Likaria [Home Physician’s Guide]. William Sydney Porter, best known as O. Henry, used to publish a newspaper which was not bad at all, but went bankrupt simply because the readers couldn’t figure out which of the two US parties he actually supported. If you want to write a truly hot story, you should send it to The Los Angeles Sun, Christian Science Monitor, Zavtra, Kievsky Telegraph, organ of Self- Defense, Ukrayina Moloda, etc. Now this is one way to rid yourself of censorship; you must determine the consumer of your analytical or publicist product, and state your own views.
Of course, you can’t do any of this living under a totalitarian regime. I don’t think that Ukraine is totalitarian — otherwise I would have used Tovarishch or Ukrayinska pravda to state my views. The fact that I did not points to the existence of a democracy in this country; there are no “distributors” of those [Red] periodicals knocking on my door at night, the way they did eighty years ago — I mean the Bolsheviks with their Iskra propaganda. Fortunately, there is The Day. Its editors have never suffered from our common narrow-minded disease, holding fast to their third position mostly favored by the intellectual part of society.
Censorship in Ukraine is not systematic, indicative of a soft spot found in democracies. In fact, all the players of the current political game have tried to use it, this being evidence of a “forced” democracy, peculiar to transition regimes — and not only in a given region of the world.
Also, censorship in Ukraine is often exposed to sarcasm, for its results prove polarized for the architects; it makes Cinderellas into Queens; anything ordinarily considered as a minor negligence is presented to the public as next to a worldwide conspiracy turning out another foolish frondeur act at closer examination.
Censorship not backed by the political system, not defending a national (i.e., common) interest, when it cannot be distinguished from political/business affiliation, means that the society accommodating it shows some headway.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the great researcher of democracy, wrote that people experience phases in their lives when old traditions and religions are ruined, when one forgets to respect one’s past, when enlightenment lacks the impetus it should have and political rights are still restricted and unreliable. During such periods one’s homeland is distrusted; one does not envision it as something having anything to do with a certain territory because the latter turns into a desert before one’s eyes; nor does one associate it with any ancestral traditions for this is something one habitually regards as a yoke; nor does one associate it with the religion one is questioning or with the laws because one was not involved in or with the lawmaking process, and the same applies to the lawmakers one fears and distrusts. People gradually lose the clear image of their homeland and things associated with it, they find themselves confined to narrow ignorant egotism. They are no longer haunted by superstitions but lack and do not realize the potential of common sense. They lack the instinctive patriotism inherent in a monarchy and rational patriotism found in a republic. They stop halfway between the former and the latter, living in ruin, being helpless.
Ukraine’s current transition phase is no exception from the algorithm worked out by that nineteenth century prophet of democracy, as evidenced primarily by current Ukrainian media sentiments. On the one hand, they eulogize national economic growth, while indiscriminately quoting from US writings and statements praising our democracy, pretending not to understand the interrelationship.
On the one hand, a lawsuit can destroy a newspaper; on the other, it is very hard to call the claimant’s bluff. On the one hand, this society expects all kinds of hot stories, on the other hand actually hating to learn the truth or hear any optimistic voices, for that matter. Therefore, the issue of censorship becomes a drop in the ocean of other ambiguous albeit more fundamental phenomena and trends, thus exposing itself to manipulations, becoming part of the swamp where all and one are likely to sink.
Do we have to struggle against censorship, political affiliation, and all those champions of truth? I would say that yes, we must struggle: not against but for things such as pluralism of thought, professionalism, common sense, and dedication to building the national state. Some will think that this author has tried to smooth over the edges characteristic of the issue — or that this author has not had first- hand experience of its acuteness. Either way is wrong.
First, I do think that anyone in his rational mind would feel embarrassed to steer a middle course between those trying to adopt a uniform procedure of serving eggs.
Second, after the recent sharp increase of chauvinism among the Western democracies, I have personally encountered twisted versions of my theses by certain ultraliberal pro- Western publications in Ukraine.
I have tried to respect their stands, yet I do feel more respect for that taken by The Day, because this newspaper has always assumed its own view. Hence, I believe that man and society are far more complex, considering polarized views, while that “worldwide conspiracy” appears so collective as to unite in its sinister ranks practically every gossipmonger.
Mark Twain had bitter experience in public politics, which he summed up by saying that democracy would be ideal only when every individual had become an aristocrat. Likewise, censorship in all its varieties will cease to exist only when every community member takes the same position. And this means never.
