I personally think calling this censorship is cheapening the word and making it easier for real censorship to happen. If anything, we should make sure that everyone actually knows that mass-media has always been edited to fit the zeitgeist and that it is important to always be curious what the archival footage shows. Which brings me to my other nitpick: BBC are *not* censoring their archives as the title is suggesting, they are *editing* their current broadcast, which has been happening for centuries when old media is being reused.
I agree, discussing why these two are different would have been a much more interesting and fruitful talk to have. Subverting the main message of a piece of art is chilling and terrifying and it is what we should be up in arms about. Instead we are talking about the cutting out of an inconsequential racist joke. There is certainly a spectrum between these two extremes.
I agree. Especially with the differentiation between altering a message and cutting a scene that does not add to the overall story and message and is only an inconsequential point in the work of art.
There are really muddy waters to be traversed in other cases, but I fail to understand what the problem is in the specific case here.
To name an example I am thinking of: changing the guns in E.T. imho actually changed the message, made the movie/story less understandable and painted a more rosy/pacifist image of US law enforcement.
It changed the underlying critique against the government's reaction mode into nothingness.
Not even a scene cut, but altered in a way to tell a different story.
Also I would like for the originals to be preserved in an accessible way so that we can learn about gone times and what was normal/acceptable for people in these eras. To be able to have the 'true' sources as objects of study. And their reception and changing over time. This way we could learn.
They're either both works of art or they're both just films, that you like one over the other subjectively (and conveniently for your argument) is by the by.
My point is that these seemingly innocuous changes are not innocuous, they are correlated with what we would all agree is censorship, because it's an indication of a culture of censoriousness. A snip here is a snip there, it's all for your own good.
Censors definitely don't care about whether something is art, that's for sure.
But isn't it reasonable to make distinction between "edit the broadcast (so that it is still entertaining) and keep the archive accessible (so we can study who we were)" and "edit all accessible versions of the media"? We all agree the second is censorship. The first, I would say, can be done incompetently and insensitively (if it is done with zero acknowledgement), but I have very hard time calling it immoral/malicious/censorship.
