Mr Mike
“ Throughout our history ,we [Americans] have been willing to trade freedom for safety during wartime”(St Luis Post Dispatch Editorial,11 October 2001).This essay will argue that a responsible government has to protect its citizens and this protection will include the use of censorship but it should not resemble an authoritarian country otherwise freedom of speech and free exercise of religion will be lost. An examination will be made about the positive aspects of censorship and why censorship is so vital to our culture,there will also be an examination about the negative impacts of censorship and how some governments try to use it to manipulate its citizens and lastly there will be emphasis to how censorship should and can be used in a democratic society. Derek Jones defines censorship as “ a variety of processes … formal and informal,overt and covert ,conscious and unconscious ,by which restrictions are imposed on the collection ,display ,dissemination, and exchange of information ,opinions ,ideas and imaginative expression”(1990). During the war on terrorism in 2001 the public in the U.S by a slim 53% agreed that is far better the government to censor news that are threatening to national security, 61 percent agreed that the government is providing them an accurate picture of what is the current situation and that the government was not suppressing their freedom of speech and the 70% said that the main reason of censorship was for protection(Pew Research Center for People and the Press, 2001). Other way that censorship helps is to fight 'cyber terrorism' because censorship blocks useful information about power grids and electricity lines,without censorship we would have cyber attacks that could result in dead phone lines ,rolling blackouts and subway train and traffic control shut-downs (Schumer,2002). This all indicate that during the war on terrorism the public in the U.S was happy with how the government was protecting them by the use of censorship