From: roger@crux.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Censorship in the USA
Date: 26 Jan 93 16:15:36 GMT
Reply-To: roger@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig)
Organization: Princeton University
Originator: news@nimaster

In article <1k3fvtINNo0r@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> br105@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jeffrey A. Del Col) writes:

>The recent thread on censorship in the USA is based on the paranoid
>assumption that there is a conspiratorial form of government in this
>country and what seems to be a nearly perfect ignorance of this country's
>legal system.  

Could you be more specific?  As I recall, the thread is based not on
any putative mental illness, but on a question: what material gets
censored, and when?

>If you think that the US as a whole is in a straitjacket of 
>covert official censorship, you are sadly misinformed, as a visit to the 
>bookstores in large cities or near universitys would demonstrate.

Who's "you"?  And who has suggested anything like that in this thread?
I don't recall anybody saying that.

(As for university bookstores, I've seen more of them than you have, I bet;
many are quite depressing.  Those near certain fundamentalist colleges
practice self-censorship, I might add, or rather, private-sector
censorship.)

>  It was especially ironic in that a number of the participants
>live in the land of the Official Secrets Act,  where it is
>still possible to be prosecuted for heresy by word.

Here in the US we don't have such an act, but that fact doesn't mean
that eternal vigilance is not necessary.  Every administration in the 
last 50 years has attempted to broaden government classification and
prior restraint.

> I have seen copies of SHOW ME for sale in the US. 

Probably at used bookstores.  St. Martins's sure doesn't distribute
it anymore.  Its legal status was never resolved, but the law that
was used in federal court in the obscenity trial in 1978 or so has
been held constitutional since then.  (The court found that the law
didn't apply because the kids depicted in the book weren't American
kids; this reasoning would not likely stand up to further scrutiny.)

>Marchetti's troubles with
>his book stem from his having signed the standard CIA employee's 
>agreement to allow the agency to read and censor his work. I wouldn't think it
>necessary to remind the indignant complainers from the UK of Nigel West's
>troubles in publishing his books about British intelligence services or the 
>disgraceful butchery done to an issue of GRANTA that contained
>the memoirs of a British spy.

So what's your point?  The question was: does the government censor?
The answer: yes it does.  Legally, contractually, however: it
happens.  No value judgment attached.

>I don't believe that material has yet been published, but I own several copies
> of the "banned" articles from the Progressive about the design of H-Bombs.

Again, what's your point?  No, the government doesn't conduct house-to-house
searches.  Yes, its laws have a chilling effect on decisions to publish.

>At least in the USA, our freedom of the press is explicitly stated in
>the Constitution, and despite assertions to the contrary has been held to
>be nearly absolute.  Efforts at prior censorship have been very few and have
>generally failed; Nixon's efforts to stop the Pentagon Papers being a case in
>point.

But look what it took.  That didn't happen with some gizmo from Korvette's,
as Woody Allen once said of something else.  That required an organized
defense, and a landmark Supreme Court decision, one we might not get
today.  

Roger