Sherry Chandler

Yesterday, one of my correspondents sent me a copy of her letter to Tom Godell, General Manager of WUKY. The letter contained this passage:

Are you trying to send a signal to the public that the administration is stifling public radio? Are you silently begging us to stand up and talk back to the administration? Surely, an educated man who has dedicated his life to broadcasting, public radio at that, does not really believe that Garrison Keillor is obscene. That would be like setting out poison cookies for Santa Claus.

You want us to speak up, don’t you?! Very clever, Mr. Godell. To whom do you suggest we protest?

This morning, in the Lexington Herald-Leader’s follow-up article on the re-installation of The Writer’s Almanac, I read this quote from Mr. Godell himself:

“The FCC says any potential complaint has to be measured against community standards,” Godell said. “I’ve now learned what Central Kentucky’s standards are. I have ammunition if we were ever faced with a complaint.”

The juxtaposition of the two ideas makes me wonder – could this all have been a clever bit of guerilla theater?

It’s a thought.

Censorship seems to be a running theme with me lately, and here’s a thing, possibly even a meme, I’ve been wanting to talk about for a few days, even before the little firestorm over The Writer’s Almanac.

In fact, since that incident – which was covered by the Lexington Herald-Leader’s Cheryl Truman last night on Comment on Kentucky as “amusing,” and I guess it was a comedy because it had a happy ending.

And, by the way, host Al Smith made a wonderful comment last night about the bombing of Hiroshima, the 60th anniversary of which is fast approaching has just passed. (It’s the anniversary of the surrender – VJ Day – that is fast approaching. I was 7 months old, practically born with the A-Bomb.)

Okay, since that WUKY incident, this post has become more relevant because it deals with the nature of censorship.

I See Invisible People has a post about Sonicwall Internet Security, which offers internet filtering services. They rate sites from Category 1 - Violence/Hate/Racism to Category 64 - Unrated. Customers may then block web sites by category.

There’s a rundown of the categories here. Most seem designed to frustrate the bored-at-work: entertainment sites and streaming media, auctions, instant messaging. Interesting, though, that you can block people from getting information about abortions or gays and lesbians. You can also block the government, the military, and religion. Equal opportunity censorship.

I guess, if a company is paying for your time and effort and you are using that company’s computer, they have a case for keeping you from wasting your time and their money bidding on squash shaped like the Virgin Mary on e-bay. Just as public libraries have a case for blocking frank content. (And spyware and data mining make security a real issue here.) But an argument might be made that the solution is as bad as the problem.

To see how well Sonicwall works, here’s the place where you can plug in your URL and see what your rating is.

I’m a 64 – unrated. Not considered pornographic quite yet, possibly because Poppysmatus bit his lip and allowed a few strategically placed asterisks (which, when you think about it, is ridiculous).

I See Invisible People is categorized as “Games,” while Talking Points Memo, as political as they come, and journalistic, is Category 31 – web communications. Have Coffee Will Write is Category 1 – violence/hate/racism.

Makes about as much sense as dropping The Writer’s Almanac for raw language.

If you want to go further into this story, I See Invisible People picked it up from The Countess, who got it from Media Girl who carries it on out into the blogosphere.