Censorship is important and necessary such that it is protects the general audience by not allowing them to be exposed to negative influences such as violence, sex, racial/religious discrimination etc. This enables the public to be exposed only to healthy content and would hence be more innocent and less corrupted by negative thoughts. Censorship is also important as it prevents children/teenagers to be exposed to negative images/content as young children tend to imitate what they see and they would also be immune to violence/sex scenes if they get exposed to too much of all these. These may instill negative values in children since young and pollute their innocent minds as they are not of the right age to be exposed to such things yet. Censorship on sensitive issues such as political, racial and religious issues etc is significant as it prevents the comments on such issues to stir-up the feelings of the people and to prevent conflicts, chaos and protect national security.
However, censorship can have its demerits as well. Without censorship, we would then be exposed to more things that improve learning and broaden horizons. Censorship also disallows transparency, openness and restricts what one is exposed to. This would also mean that censorship sort of control the freedom of the people and their rights to know the truth. With censorship, many people would be even more curious to find out what are the things that are actually censored and this would lead to the censored content attracting interest of more people instead of people just ignoring it if it wasn’t even censored in the first place. This means that censorship ends up catching the attention of more people to watch what they shouldn’t be watching instead of limiting the number of people exposed to the censored content. Censorship also leads to ignorance which creates negative effects as people would tend to be more sheltered and protected from unhealthy content which means that they would be very easily affected by such issues when they grow up and may not be able to accept the openness of the society. Hence, it is crucial not to protect the public to such an extent that they may have lack of early exposure to media and lack of education in such areas.
Censorship has its own pros and cons as we can see from above. I feel that whether there is a need for censorship will still have to depend on the content itself whether it will cause harm to the society by instilling the wrong moral values and harmful purpose or if it is just harmless.
This article shows how unreliable the media can be. The fact that even Taiwan’s leading TV news channel TVBS reported news that are untrue reminded viewers that even news programme which are assumed to be reliable by most people, can actually be inaccurate as well. The lack of professionalism by news journalists due to the aggressive competition between news channels is getting more common and the reporting standards are decreasing greatly as the news station cares more about hitting sky-high ratings rather than having quality news which defeats the real purpose of broadcasting news. I feel that this incident has portrayed not only the lack of professionalism but also the lack of social responsibility by betraying the trust of the viewers and making them believe in something that is made up which could have affected some of the locals. Even the police force has wasted time, effort and resources in investigating the video. This shows that it is extremely irresponsible of the journalist to ignore these consequences and still go on with the filming of the video.
It is really sad to know that news reports which are supposedly known to be reliable are becoming more and more doubtful. It becomes difficult to decide whether to believe what is reported on the news.
Stricter laws and legislations should be made to prevent news stations from reporting fake “stories” and to start regaining the trust of viewers. However, I feel that even if it is so, it is never impossible to ensure that ALL the news stations broadcasts the most accurate news, hence the doubt on the accuracy on news reports will stay for long.
