The sounds of silence in the media: when violator and violated withhold information (original) (raw)

This chapter in Wodak and Koller (2008) refers to the nature of censorship in the media. Such censorship is viewed as an action of silencing that occurs in at least two ways: (i) an authoritative body imposes censorship in order to obscure information it believes to be harmful either to itself or to others, and (ii) an individual or a group exercises self-censorship by withholding information believed to be harmful to themselves or to others. Between the two extremes of imposing silence by killing the speaker and achieving silence by subduing the speaker into self-censorship, there are a range of ways and means of dictating what can be said and what not. Thiesmeyer’s (2003:11) claim that “silencing results from an act of language where language is used in order to enable some kinds of expression and to disable others” is taken as a point of departure. The chapter considers overt and covert forms of censorship that range from ignoring the voices of minority groups or digressing opinions, through forbidding publication, to burning newspapers and even murdering writers of provocative texts. It specifically considers the structure and use of two kinds of censorship prevalent in media discourses, namely censorship of the powerful who may violate the rights of lesser subjects, and self-censorship of those more vulnerable who are not easily able to claim rights of free speech. Illustratively, reference is made to South African legislation used in censoring the media during the 1980s, and to political, historical and social circumstances which gave rise to the publication (or not) of censored media texts. The focus is on events of silencing the media in South Africa in 1986 when severe state censorship was introduced to subdue and stamp out the growing protest of disenfranchised citizens. [Chapter 6 in Wodak, R. and V. Koller (eds.) 2008. Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere. Berlin: Mouton DeGruyter.]

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