Image of Henry Kissinger’s backside by David Levine that was pulled from the NYT Op-Ed Page AlterNet reports on a new book by Jerelle Kraus, the former art director of The New York Times Od-Ed and editorial pages, that details the censorship of editorial illustrations in The New York Times. The book All The Art That’s Fit to [...]
According to The Associated Press: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously . . . that a small religious group cannot force a city in Utah to place a granite marker in a local park that already is home to a Ten Commandments display. The case, reported in NCAC’s last issue of Censorship News, involves a Salt Lake City based religious sect [...]
Jurist reports that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has held that a California ban on the sale of video games to minors is unconstitutional. According to Jurist: The bill, originally signed into law by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in October 2005, prohibited the sale or rental of violent video games to minors under the age of [...]
According to the Student Press Law Center, Josh Moore, a college sophomore in Kentucky, has collaborated with a state representative to introduce a bill into the Commonwealth’s House of Representatives that seeks to combat restrictions on student press. Moore believes that it is better for students to be given full responsibility as journalists and to suffer the consequences, than for [...]
It has been a busy week for book censorship. On Tuesday, MSNBC reported that The Bookseller of Kabul, a nonfiction account of life inside an Afghan household, was removed from a high school in Wyandotte, Michigan. The book had been assigned for an 11th grade honors English class at Roosevelt High School. MSNBC quotes a former teacher at the school: [...]
NCAC's director Joan Bertin responds to Ian Buruma's op-ed on the Dutch legislator Geert Wilders in a recent letter to the editor in The New York Times. According to Bertin: Ian Buruma is right to note how ironic it is that the Dutch legislator Geert Wilders is becoming a free speech martyr while seeking to ban the Koran. But Mr. Buruma [...]
The Daily Collegian reports that charges of failure to disperse and disorderly conduct have been refiled against Michael Felletter, the student photographer who was accused of "taking photographs that would excite the crowd and encourage destructive behavior" after taking photographs on assignment at a riot following an Ohio State football game. The charges were dropped last week only to be [...]
On his first day in office, Barack Obama issued a memo reviving The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The memo states: “The Freedom of Information Act should be administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails.” This is a clear change from the policy of the Bush administration. As Slate puts it: Under Bush-Ashcroft, the presumption [...]
According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, charges against the student photographer Michael Felletter are likely to be refiled. Michael Felletter, a photographer for Penn State’s newspaper The Daily Collegian, was charged with disorderly conduct and failure to disperse after taking photographs during a post-Ohio State football game riot and disobeying orders from policemen to leave the [...]
According to The Bismarck Tribune, author John Berendt has a new respect for North Dakota, after his book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was first pulled, then reinstated in the Beulah High School library. While he was initially shocked at the book's removal after parent's complained about "pornographic" content, he followed the news and comments and was [...]
On January 8th, we reported that a San Franciscan chiropractor was suing a former patient, Christopher Norberg, over a negative review on Yelp. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, this case has since been settled (the details of the settlement remain confidential), and the offending post has been taken down to be replaced with: “A misunderstanding between both parties led [...]
The Star Tribune reports that students of Faribault High School, Minnesota, have moved their newspaper online after it was shut down by the school's superintendent. The superintendent shut down the paper after student editors refused to show him an article about an investigation into a middle school teacher before going to press. Now students will publish their newspaper Echo exclusively [...]
The Washington Post reports the death of Richard Seaver, the censorship-fighting editor and translator who worked with Barney Rosset at Grove Press to publish such controversial books as Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch and The Story of O and who helped bring Samuel Beckett to a wider English-speaking audience.
Gene Policinski of the First Amendment Center sheds some light on the topic of internet censorship in a recent article in the North Country Gazette. He argues that, while the first amendment does not apply to private companies, privately owned internet companies have an unprecedented amount of control over the speech of large groups of people. For hundreds of millions [...]
UPDATE: Earlier today, Yelp users were protesting the lawsuit by posting a rash of negative comments about Biegel on Yelp. Since then, these negative comments have been removed, presumably by Yelp, which, according to its terms of service, "reserves the right (but has no obligation) to remove or suppress User Content from the Site at its sole discretion for any [...]
Recently, there have been reports that content involving the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict is mysteriously disappearing from Facebook. The Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF) has complained that “many threads in various pro-Israel and pro-JIDF groups have mysteriously disappeared,” while others have complained that anti-Zionist content has disappeared, and one girl alleged that Facebook has prevented her from using hashtags such as [...]