The Censorship Of North Korea

Throughout the development of new nations within the last two centuries, there have been various issues raised and fought over regarding the ruling of the nations themselves and the nation’s peoples. These issues range anywhere from form of government; whether a nation should be a tyranny, monarchy, or a democracy; to how much freedom the nation’s citizens should have. By and large one of the most important topics in recent politics is the idea of media censorship, anywhere from the question of first amendment rights in the United States to the extremely dystopian society of North Korea, where incredibly censored and doctored information dominates social life - and anything positive is re-written to be caused by their ‘dear leader’, whoever the current monarch may be.

Violence, along with pornography, is one of the largest topics of the censorship debate, as well as the effect of exposure to violence. “Until age nineteen, children and teens exposed to media violence are more likely to view violence as a normal behavior and to become criminals themselves,” says New Republic editor Gregg Easterbrook. People, mostly children, who are still in the formative stages of their lives will be much more influenced by maliciously aligned media than those who are older, and have already established their core values and beliefs. However, it has also been shown that the acts of violence and murder frequently shown in movies (and seemingly replicated by some few children) have also occurred in children before the invention of television, or film - such as in the Leopold-Loeb “Perfect Crime” murder case of 1924, which was in fact later adapted into its own violent media five years later (Easterbrook 1). In the Leopold-Loeb murder case, Nathan Le...

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...ia does not mean that it should be censored outright. If this were the case, almost no one would be able to access such media, regardless of the influence it may have on them.

When it comes down to it, however, it is not entirely a government’s place to censor all the media that is created in its country. Regardless of what censorship rules are put into place, there is guaranteed to always be some amount of media, be it large or small, that will leak through such an ‘information blockade’. As such it is the job, in the case of children, of their guardians to protect them from such harmful media, or to choose not to. In today’s society, adults have more than enough tools at their disposal to shield their kids from violence, if they so desire, with options like parental controls and new safety modes on smartphones that restrict access to certain areas on the device.