Ideally newspapers would control themselves and would not be tight to the number of eyeballs generated by a given piece of news. If the government or the law making process can be considered as an emanation of the citizen, it becomes legitimate for them to control the public expiration to some extent. For example racism (hatred for a race) is banned from public expression in many European countries. For China it's difficult to understand, but cpc has had a strong popular legitimation in the past, and priorities are different in the mind if Chinese people, public expression is secondary too many other topics, like corruption, inflation, food safety, etc.
would that be censored? how about if the facts underlying a case are seen to provoke something like racism - is it then legitimate to change the facts or censor them to the public.
"If the government or the law making process can be considered as an emanation of the citizen, it becomes legitimate for them to control the public expiration to some extent"
Unbelievable paradoxical statement: Starts with an If.. Ends with a vague to some extent.. and sticks the massive assumption of "it becomes legitimate for them to control the public expiration" - Why? Why is that legitimate?.
Perhaps in a democracy you might very carefully start to make such conclusions, but the Chinese people don't pick their government. There only chance of change is rebellion. Perhaps thats why news is suppressed?
Please, elaborate your statement - in laymans terms if possible, as I find the semantics in your statements quite difficult to follow.
A nation gives its government the mission to drive it trough hard times toward the future. One part on this mission can include some limitation on public speech, why not?
I personally think it is dangerous and often useless, but some other people may have different priorities. Then the problem is the legitimacy of the government. This is obvious in China for the cpc but I would not say they are completely illegitimate. And our western governments are not always legit either.
So you really want me to explain why people should have free speech, at this level of debate, it is unbelievable you could ask - why not?
Let me give you the big why not: because your opinion right now is free speech on a forum of free speech.
Please don't back pedal and say your just talking about dangerous hate inducing free speech. Because we both know that isn't the case. The context is a government which has always tortured dissenters. A government which drove tanks over peaceful protesters.
A government based on the notion of rebellion not reform, which is doing everything humanly possible to stop rebellion ever happening again. That's the communist paradox. That's the ultimate source of propaganda.
