Sunday, July 08, 2007

Contemptible prevarication

The Pakistani newspaper Dawn (http://www.dawn.com/2007/07/08/top2.htm) states:

> For the first time during the five-day battle, the government
> tried to impose a censorship on the media by not allowing
> its personnel to proceed close to Lal Masjid.

This is not censorship. If a media story about the five-day battle was not allowed to be published, that would be censorship. I imagine that, in most free countries, the media is also not allowed into a citizen's home - that's not censorship either. It's called privacy. Ditto for access to certain government offices, crime scenes, military conflict, operation theatres - for various reasons, many entirely unrelated to censorship.

As an aside: certainly an amusing phrase, that (its personnel). And, also a telling one; the media has begun to regard itself as a unified organization, with uniformed drones entitled to be beyond laws and norms of civilized behaviour.

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