What if There Was a Ban on Violent Media?
The Difficulties of Prohibiting Bloody Video Games and Movies
There is much debate all around the world today about the level of violence in today's media-movies, video games and the internet. This article details ideas about a complete ban on violent media in the US.
Freedom of Expression is a right. Something that democratic states have relied on for centuries to lay their foundations on. Look how countries without freedom of expression have ended up. Iraq, for example, is only just recovering today from a regime which did not allow freedom of expression. On the original Bill of Rights of America, one of its main points was the importance of free speech and it is one of the many reasons so many people immigrated to America from their oppressors Europe.
Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest modern philosophers once said on his website that, “If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
That is to say that if freedom of expression does not apply to everything then it should not exist at all. Basically if the government put regulations or a ban on violent media then in all fairness they must apply these restrictions to all other aspects of media: books and even newspapers.
What Would Happen if a Violent Media Ban was Started in America?
The media is already regulated to an extent. Movie and video game age ratings where appropriate do not upset anyoneBut anything further than this may seem to be a little extreme.
Firstly, if a formal ban was introduced, the word 'violent' would have to be defined-what constitutes violence? Blood? Death? This would be a very hard, and probably controversial decision if made and then would probably be somehow combated by many different groups.
Then. every single book that is available in the US would have to be checked by some kind of 'vetting agency'. Every CD would have to be listened to, every film watched to see if it contained 'banned content'.
Each day, every newspaper would have checked to see if it contain anything that would be thought to be 'violent'.
Customs would have a very large job on their hands. Each film, book, CD passing through their office would have to be checked to see if it was legal.
What Would Happen to the Internet?
By far the largest problem with such a ban would be the internet. The majority of the United States' population have internet access and within that have access to video sharing websites such as YouTube which contains over 64,000,000 videos. The easiest thing to do would be to outright ban the internet access but this would have many problems. "Pirate Internet Access" would become a problem and the overall population would be very angry with such an issue.
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