...March 1, 2012 Freedom of speech is the idea that people can speak freely without being stopped, or censored. The United States First Amendment states that people have the right for absolute freedom of speech, which raises concern for when freedom of speech should be limited. Being able to speak freely is important. It allows us to speak our minds without being punished for our ideas. Freedom of speech in relevance to our time is very crucial. More and more people are beginning to voice their opinions and the construction of free speech is one of great importance. When thinking of free speech many issues and topics come into play. Today it seems that free speech in social networking has become increasingly prevalent. Over four hundred million people across the world are involved in some sort of social network, thus the importance of their voice when dealing with free speech. People want their voice to be heard, especially using things such as Twitter and Facebook. The issue of this however concerns the creators and if they should monitor what is being said on these sites. If social networking sites were to monitor our every action and every word, would we feel as if they abide by the freedom of speech law? What if one day you logged onto Facebook and there was a notification telling you that you were being monitored and could no longer say whatever you wanted whenever you wanted? Most of us would be outraged and angry that we could not express our opinions. No one wants...
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...use the community standards models to determine which pornographic material are in accordance with societal morals, and which should be categorized as obscene. John Stuart Mill and the Harms of Pornography is an article written by David Dyzenhaus in 1992, professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. In his article, he raises an interesting idea that liberalists and feminists would support the censorship of pornography (Dyzenhaus, 1992). The feminist viewpoint argues that pornography shows men forcing women into sex; therefore it should be censored because of the harm it causes against women. Dyzenhaus then hypothesizes that because pornography is portrayed as violent material, the classical liberalists such as John Stuart Mill would defend the feminists in censoring such behavior based on his harm principle. The article also raises gender inequality issues of contemporary society, one being the subordination of men to women. Three political philosophies are concerned with the law of obscenity: liberalism, conservatism and feminism. Conservative morality takes into consideration the elements of virtue or wickedness behind pornography and asks if the material in question poses threat to society. Liberalism, alternatively, is concerned with the repercussive effects of withholding such material from the public, and whether it would be more detrimental not to permit its publication (Mahoney 8). Both liberal and conservative approaches believe that harm needs...
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...|Music Censorship | |Final Draft | | | | | | | |Emilee Westerfield | | | |University Composition and Communication II/COM156 | | | |11.18.2012 | | ...
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...It was the writers in the last war who wrote propaganda that finished themselves off that way. There is plenty of stuff that you believe absolutely that you can write which is useful enough without having to write propaganda….If we are fighting for what we believe in we might as well always keep on believing in what we have believed, and for me this is to write nothing that I do not think is the absolute truth.” -To Maxwell Perkins, Finca Vigia, Cuba, May 30, 1942 It would be nice to designate the Second World War with a factual title, such as The Good War, or The Best War Ever, but in retrospect neither of these titles would be an honest opinion to the military or the civilian victims of the war. Historians and journalists alike, being that one cannot be the other and therefore should never be confused but for the instance of the following should be entitled to the same mistakes, insinuate that the portrayal of the Second World War was an accurate one without the tremendous censorship and propaganda that transpired out of the First World War. Undoubtedly, to believe such an apparent statement of propaganda would be to dismiss the actions and the transformation of the techniques used by propaganda agencies between the two wars. Institutions, which included the U.S. Government, its military branches, and more important media outlets, were well aware of their failings in the eyes of the American public before the treaty of Versailles in 1918. It became necessary for these...
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...many schools and libraries for being a racist novel. A public library in Massachusetts detested the content of the novel, removing it from the shelves and followed by stating, “trash...more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people,” (Apstein 2). Another author even went as far as comparing Huck Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, another challenged book, and said, “I would rather my children read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, even though it is far more vivid in its depiction of cruelty than Huckleberry Finn,” (Smiley 7). Many people see the book as a “racist novel.” Nigger is used repeatedly and the slave, Jim, is mistreated, but Twain was simply no sugar coating the very real side to the mistreatment of blacks in his society. It is also said in the novel that Jim is “white on the inside.” Huck says this because the only thing he was ever exposed to was the idea that whites should be superior. If he sees a man who is meant to be treated less than human as someone who is respected based on skin color than the audience should see this as the ultimate moment of friendship and acceptance. This concept solidifies the novel’s importance remaining in...
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...Shortly after the Second World War ended, America was swept into a period of mass hysteria now recognized as the Second Red Scare. This period of time, which occurred from 1947 and lasted until the late 1950s, was popularly known as “McCarthyism.” As the lead proponent who spoke out against communism and subversion in the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy added fuel to the popular fear by initiating a series of accusations of government officials who were supposedly communist supporters. This “witch-hunt” that resulted from McCarthy’s reign of terror is reflected in the movie Good Night and Good Luck. Since any challenge to McCarthy’s authority would lead to suspicion and eventual attack, many didn’t speak out against McCarthy’s tactics in fear of being discredited themselves. However, this film not only captured the fear and terror that McCarthy’s accusations created, but also identified Edward R. Murrow, a journalist and host working under the Columbia Broadcasting Station, as one of the few who dared speak out against Senator McCarthy. Good Night and Good Luck, named after Murrow’s famous sign-offs that concluded his program See It Now, is a realistic presentation of the communist paranoia that enveloped America and the emergence of television as a mass media. Directed by George Clooney, Good Night and Good Luck follows Edward R. Murrow and his CBS crew in a production that addresses how the media can offer a voice that counters that of the government. Wanting to report...
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...Thalia Capilla July 26, 2014 POSC146: Mass Media and Public Opinion Thalia Capilla POSC 146 Justin Nelson Downfall of News Coverage In Depicting War The ideal news coverage is a mirror image of reality, thousands of Americans tune in to their local or national news channel for quality coverage and accuracy. In the 1960’s Vietnam became the first war to be televised, resulting in a large disapproval rating on the war. However, the American people saw the truth and gave their opinion. Today the media is nowhere near the ideal news coverage, being characterized as corporate, concentrated and conglomerate. News Media is a profit making enterprise owned by a few companies. So what changed? How did the media evolve into something so filtered by the government? In this Literature Review I will cover how international affairs and war coverage quality has drastically declined to fit corporate news norms. It sacrifices quality over quantity, framing the American people. News media in a democracy should provide a forum for diverse views and provide the people with the truth of what is happening around the world, (McLeod 2009). That is what I would like shed light on in this paper. News framing, agenda setting and priming are broadly examined by Scheufelel and Tewksbury (2007) to see how all three are related and what the potential relationships can infer about the effects of mass media. This is an important analysis as these three components of the subtle effects model can...
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...When I was ten I witnessed my first public execution. I thought it was normal. I rationalised the execution as punishment for betraying the Great Leader. Everything in North Korea is about unwavering loyalty to the Great Leader. Every novel. Every newspaper. Every movie. Every podcast. Every form of public information is dominated by one topic – the Great Leader. Roads are named after him, slogans praise him, and posters of him are displayed in every school. As human beings we believe what we are taught. We submit to authority and rarely question societal values. We accept what we see and hear as the ‘truth’. We fail to think critically about our nation’s ideology. Today I address you as a North Korean defector. I urge you to question societal belief systems. Your leader, Donald Trump, recently spoke about the ‘cruel dictatorship in North Korea’. His admonition towards North Korea reflected existing perceptions, with 51% of all Americans considering North...
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...and its affect on Art Regardless if you like art, music or just simply reading books, I am sure you have your favorites that have made a serious impact on your life, but what about all those works that you never got to see, read or feel? Maybe you never will, if they have fallen victim to the act of censoring. “Censorship is defined as the alteration or removal of works of art from public view” (Frank 92). Along with wars, conflicts, cultural influences, and evolution of societies, censorship has had an enormous effect on art of the past and will greatly alter the trajectory of art in the future for better or worse. The one who controls the ultimate decision whether to eliminate or support expression through art will be of the utmost importance in the growth and development of artistic expression. “The struggle for freedom of expression is as ancient as the history of censorship” (Newth). Everywhere free expression has been achieved, censorship follows, never too far behind. One of the more famous acts of censorship occurred when Socrates, a most influential philosopher of history was sentenced to drink poison for “corrupting” the youth with his ideals that varied from the current political and moral codes of his time. This happened in 399 BC. Gives you an idea of how long censorship has effected expression, and this is by no means the first time censorship took place in history. I personally never put too much thought into censorship and the severity of its faults until I read...
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...Americans were exposed to propaganda encouraging them to support the war effort by doing simple tasks, such as donating blood, working harder at their jobs, saving cigarette tinfoil wrappers, and buying war bonds. President Roosevelt saw the importance of providing the country with information and opinions, so he formed the Office of War Information with intent to disperse the public opinion of the true enemy of war and responsibilities of each American during the war. Enemy soldiers were a target audience for discouraging messages, sending messages to suggest a wrong allegiance and encouraged doubt for their cause. In the 1940’s, the movie industry ignited. Nearly ninety million Americans went to the movies each week during the war, and movie companies...
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...Grade Failure, Drop out and Subsequent School Outcomes: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Uruguayan Administrative Data Marco Manacorda This version: November 2006 QMUL, CEP and STICERD (LSE) and CEPR This paper uses administrative longitudinal micro data on about 100,000 Uruguayan students in public non-vocational Junior High school (grades 7-9) to identify the causal effect of grade failure on students' subsequent school outcomes. Exploiting the discontinuity in promotion rates induced by a rule that establishes that a pupil missing more than 25 days during the school year will automatically fail that grade I show that grade failure leads to substantial drop out and lower educational attainment after 4 to 5 years since the time when failure first occurred. Complementary evidence based on a change in the regime of grade promotion provides additional support for this conclusion. Keywords: grade retention, school drop out, age-grade distortion, regression discontinuity. JEL codes: I21, I22, J20 I am grateful to Jerome Adda, David Card, Thomas Lemieux, Alan Manning, Guy Michael, Justin McCrary, Enrico Moretti, Barbara Petrongolo, Tommaso Valletti, Steve Pischke, Miguel Urquiola and seminar participants at UC Berkeley, LSE, Paris-Jourdan, University of Toulouse, IGIER-Bocconi, the Universidad de la Republica (Montevideo) and the Gerencia de Planeamiento y Evaluación de la Gestión Educativa de ANEP for many helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Veronica Amarante...
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...How far do you agree that the origins of the Cold War in 1945 and 1946 owed much to the ideological differences and little to personalities and conflicting national interests? The origins of the Cold War cannot be denied as being most obviously and most forefront due to the great ideological differences between the USSR’s communism and the USA’s capitalism, such as their complete opposing beliefs over nationalisation and system of government. However National interests, such as the fight over Poland and leaders personalities, such as Truman’s lack of experience in foreign policy cannot be overlooked as important reasons for growing hostilities between superpowers. The vast difference in ideologies is clearly the underlying factor which caused tensions for the superpowers of the world during the Cold War and the years 1945 to 46; however it cannot be denied that personalities of the leaders running these countries, were a contributing reason for the ever growing hostilities between them. Joseph Stalin, leader of the USSR and communist regime, was a figure known for being shrewd, manipulative and ruthless, instantly suggesting that relations with other countries, so different from his, were to be quite strained. Though he was known for these negative traits, he was also commended for his sense of practicality and his skills as an administrator, this suggesting that perhaps his ability to put aside differences, may be better than necessarily believed. It was common knowledge...
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...1. Analyse the problems of the Weimar republic After the First World War, Kaiser resigned due to November Revolution and later on, in 1919, a federal republic met in Weimar, Germany to replace the imperial form of government, which is known as Weimar Republic. This Republic lasted until 1933, and was destroyed by Hitler. It went to three stages. In the first stage, which was from 1919-23, there was instability when the republic was struggling to survive. In the second stage, from 1923-29, there was stability when Gustav Streseman was the leading politician. This stability was due to the Dawes plan of 1924 in which USA provided huge loans. In the third or last stage, from 1929-33 there was instability again which led to the downfall of the Weimar Republic. The short term cause was the world economic crisis, which has disastrous effects on Germany, resulting in 6.5 million unemployed. This sudden situation made the government unable to cope with the situation and by the end of 1923 the Weimar republic seemed on the verge of collapse. There were several long term causes for that. Some of them were: 1. It had a number of disadvantages from the beginning the Republic was formed. a. It had accepted the humiliation and unpopular treaty of Versailles Treaty: The republic was not strong enough to reject the defeat and dishonour. b. There was a traditional lack of respect for democratic government: The Germans always favoured the army, and thought that the Democrats...
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...Trolling through Twitter hashtags Andrei Coste Context Internet Trolling has been around ever since there were means that users could communicate with each other over web protocols. It’s deeply rooted in the internet culture and is often considered to be a form of bullying (cyberbullying). The website Know Your Meme says that “the contemporary use of the term is alleged to have appeared on the Internet in the late 1980s, but the earliest known mention of the word “troll” on record can be found in a post on the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban from December 14th, 1992. The term continued to grow popular in the early 1990s through its usage in the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban and by the late 1990s, the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup had such heavy traffic and participation that acts of trolling became frowned upon. Prior to the widespread use of the term “trolling,” similar behaviors have been observed through “griefing,” the act of intentionally causing distress to other players in an online game, since the days of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) in the late 1980s and “flaming,” the act of instigating hostility or unpleasant exchanges in online forums, which also emerged through Usenet newsgroup discussions”. They also state that In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities. Early trolling was relatively innocuous, taking place inside of small, single-topic Usenet groups. The trolls employed what...
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...out, names that represent more than just a person, but represent an era in American history. The list of important and influential figures in American history is too long and numerous to list. Yet there is always one name, one man who stands above all the rest. Abraham Lincoln has come to define the American experience. His beginnings as a poor farmer in Kentucky to his rise in politics to his Presidency, his story fascinates everyone who reads and studies it. Abraham Lincoln is the epitome of what America is. He is Americas most cherished and beloved President and he may be the most well known American President in the world. Despite all the praise bestowed upon Abraham Lincoln there are those who do not buy into the ‘official’ Lincoln legacy. A small, but growing group of Lincoln detractors claim that Lincoln was not the father of freedom and liberty, the great emancipator and the savior of the union; they see Lincoln as a diabolical dictator. A man who took advantage of America in its darkest hour, a man who had no respect for the Constitution, he instead sought to destroy and undermine it every chance he got. Abraham Lincoln was President during America’s darkest hour; he saved the union and kept the country together. Lincoln was justified in the actions he took, despite attempts to paint Lincoln as a tyrannical dictator there is no question that Lincoln’s status as America’s greatest President is deserved and true. During his Presidency Lincoln met fierce opposition. This...
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