Australian parliamentarians can and do use their position to protect their thin skins. It is welcome news that Shane Bazzi won an appeal overturning a ruling that he defamed Peter Dutton. Binoy Kampmark reports.
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World Press Freedom Day on May 3 was marked in many places, including outside the ABC Centre and Channel 7 studios where campaigners for Julian Assange's release gathered. Stephen Langford reports.
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Twitter’s permanent suspension of Donald Trump’s account on January 8 was an anti-climactic conclusion to a presidency that ultimately finished with a whimper rather than a bang, writes Leo Crnogorcevic.
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This statement was released on behalf of the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP) on August 17.
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How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to the horrors of Pol Pot, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant’s rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia. -
What are some examples of highly offensive words that must be censored from radio? For British state broadcaster BBC, they are not all of the four-letter variety. The BBC appears to find not just the phrase “Free Palestine” but even the geographical entity of the Gaza Strip itself unutterable on a cultural show. A controversy has broken out over the BBC's anti-Palestinian bias after its digital radio channel BBC 1xtra, which largely plays hip hop, grime and other “urban music” genres, censored on air references to Palestine. -
Authoritarian governments hate sex, and it seems the Australian government is no exception. The current target is the adult porn industry, with a focused attempt to roll back access to adult and consensual pornography. Money and resources are thus diverted from real evils, such as the physical and sexual abuse of children. On May 21, the Fairfax press announced that incoming passenger cards for those arriving in Australia had been changed so individuals would now be obliged to declare whether or not they had pornography in their possession.
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The March 15 banning of two Socialist Alliance activists, Paul Benedek and myself, from the University of Sydney was revoked on April 9, after vice-chancellor Michael Spence received a storm of protest letters.
