{"id":235744,"date":"2023-05-22T12:00:53","date_gmt":"2023-05-22T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=235744"},"modified":"2023-05-21T04:05:44","modified_gmt":"2023-05-21T03:05:44","slug":"a-century-of-censorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/05\/a-century-of-censorship\/","title":{"rendered":"A Century of Censorship"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A painstaking timeline of over a hundred years of U.S. information suppression, secret bureaucracies, and “anti-disinformation” scares.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

19 May 2023 – <\/em>The turn of the last century brought an age of revolutions, industrial warfare and nearly instantaneous communications across long distances. With these developments came an emphasis on another method of war: information war. This was the type of fight waged with what World War II Deputy Director of the Office of Censorship, Theodore F. Koop, called \u201cSilent Weapons,\u201d in a wartime memoir he published in 1946.\u00a0Wrote Koop:<\/p>\n

The censors\u2019 shears were bayonets that not only formed a rear-guard national defense but also struck hard at the enemy in all three phases of warfare\u2014military, economic, and psychological.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Koop would go on to run CBS News in Washington, DC. Well-known as a powerful media figure, he was also a trusted one, the man who hired Walter Cronkite<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Less well-known was that in 1955, President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked him to run a secret national censorship program intended for use in Cold War emergencies. He accepted the offer while still a network news executive, serving in that contingency role under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.<\/p>\n

The methods of censorship had changed over time, matching changes in the communication technology. During World War I, the United States Government used the Postal Service<\/a>, the Comstock laws<\/a> and the reliance on publications reaching subscribers by mail as a wedge. When radio and television broadcasts became pre-eminent, the newly formed Federal Communications Commission began using its authority as stewards of the public airwaves to watch over content. Under the FCC Act of 1934, ostensibly private corporations like CBS, ABC and NBC were allowed to use the public airwaves only under license, acquiring revenue and learning the power of shaping the discourse from the nascent field of advertising.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Clockwise from top left: Franklin Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, Harry S Truman, and Joseph McCarthy<\/p><\/div>\n

Though it all, one thing has been remarkably consistent. Government targeted for special attention journalists who reported accurately on the ugly truth of American foreign policy, such as John W. Powell. Powell was an American journalist based in Shanghai who wrote a series of articles for the <\/a>China Monthly Review<\/a> <\/em>(later, the <\/a>Weekly Review<\/a>)<\/em>, which said the Chinese government claimed the United States was using biological weapons in the Korean War. He was put on trial for sedition in 1959<\/a>. The case dragged on in federal court in San Francisco for five years before the charges were dropped. It was enough to make him leave journalism forever.<\/p>\n

The impulse to use censorship, and call all information that doesn\u2019t square with the official narrative \u201cdisinformation,\u201d is a bipartisan impulse, at least historically. Both Republican and Democratic administrations during the Global War on Terror sought to expand and refine the power of what we now call the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The latter was built, piece by piece, over a century of legislation, executive action, and regulation. A little less than a century after the passage of the Espionage Act, Barack Obama\u2019s administration used it aggressively to target leakers<\/a>. By that time, computers, the internet, and social media were all new platforms for communication and ripe targets for information suppression.<\/p>\n

In an era where cultural memory is short and resources for learning about the inconvenient past are becoming more scarce, it\u2019s useful to look at this century-plus progression in chronological order.<\/p>\n

A CENTURY OF CENSORSHIP<\/strong><\/p>\n

June 15, 1917<\/strong>: As the United States enters World War I, the Espionage Act of 1917 is enacted<\/a> by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson, the first academic to become President, prohibiting \u201cobtaining information, recording pictures, or copying descriptions of any information relating to the national defense with intent or reason to believe that the information may be used for the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Act also made obstructing enlistment in the armed forces or causing insubordination or disloyalty in military or naval forces an illegal act. Wilson\u2019s administration also decided that any publications violating the act were \u201cnon-mailable matter,\u201d and this rationale was used to suppress dissenting views by aggressively enforcing the postal codes so no subversive publications could reach their subscribers. At least 74 newspapers were denied mailing permits at this time.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"\"<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Milwaukee socialist Victor Berger, convicted of the Espionage Act in 1914<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

May 16, 1918<\/strong>: The Sedition Act of 1918<\/a> extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover more offenses, making it a crime to:<\/p>\n