You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom Read Free

reporter moves from the politics to the business desk. She resolves to start digging into the backgrounds of the Russian oligarchs who have set up home in London. She believes she can connect them to the kleptomaniac dictators the revolutionaries in the Middle East are challenging. She has criticised British politicians without fear of the consequences for years, but her editor turns pale when she talks about using the same tactics against plutocrats. The smallest factual mistake or unsupportable innuendo could lead to a libel action that could cost the paper a million pounds, ‘and we don’t have a million pounds’. She ploughs on, and produces an article that is so heavily cut and rewritten by the in-house lawyers no one can understand it. ‘I want a thousand words on trends in fashion retailing by lunch-time,’ the editor says when she starts work the next day.
A member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party reads a speech by Hillary Clinton. ‘When countries curtail Internet freedom, they place limits on their economic future. Their young people don’t have full access to the conversations and debates happening in the world or exposure to the kind of free enquiry that spurs people to question old ways and invent new ones. Barring criticism of officials makes governments more susceptible to corruption, which creates economic distortions with long-term effects. Freedom of thought and the level playing field made possible by the rule of law are part of what fuels innovation economies.’ The old communist is a man who has trained himself never to show his emotions in case they reveal weaknesses to his rivals in the party. But he thinks of China’s booming economy and America’s fiscal and trade deficits, and for the first time in years he throws back his head and roars with laughter.
     
    What follows is an examination of how censorship in its clerical, economic and political forms works in practice. It is a history of the controversies of our times, and an argument that free speech is better than suppression in almost all circumstances. I hope that I will have convinced you by the end that the limits on free speech – for there are always limits – should be few, and that the law must refuse to implement them if there is a hint of a public interest in allowing debate to continue unimpeded.
    My subject is censorship that hurts, not spin or the unstoppable desire of partisan newspapers, broadcasters and bloggers to preach to the converted and dismiss or ignore news their audiences do not wish to hear. I accept that press officers’ manipulation of information is an attempt to limit and control. But manipulation becomes censorship only on those rare occasions when the law punishes those who expose the spin. I agree too that editorial suppression is a type of censorship, because it ensures that readers rarely find a good word about trade unions in a right-wing newspaper, or a sympathetic article about Israel in a left-wing journal. The effects are trivial, because those readers who do not wish to be spoon-fed opinions can find contrary views elsewhere, and a journalist who does not like the party line of one media organisation can choose to move to another. True censorship removes choice. It menaces and issues commands that few can ignore. Write a free-thinking novel, and religious terrorists will come to assassinate you. Tell the world about your employers’ incompetence, and they will deprive you of your livelihood. Criticise a pharmaceutical corporation or an association of ‘alternative health’ quacks and they will seek to bankrupt you in the English courts. Speak out in a dictatorship, and the secret police will escort you to jail.
    The invention of the Net, like all communications revolutions before it, is having and will have profound effects – which I do not seek to belittle. Its effect on the ability of the strong and the violent to impose their views is less marked than optimists