Have we created a media culture where politicians fear voicing an opinion that’s not the party line? Max Wind-Cowie reports
Thoughts policed: Max Wind-Cowie
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CATEGORY: Magazine
The politics of terror: Conor Gearty
In the drive to tackle extremism, debate is being undermined and fear is driving the agenda. Conor Gearty makes the case for common sense.
Future imperfect: Jason DaPonte
Should concerns about privacy after the NSA revelations change the way we use the web? Jason DaPonte asks the experts about state spying, corporate control and what we can do to protect ourselves
My book and the school library: Norma Klein
Norma Klein, the American writer of children’s books, describes how she successfully defended her Confessions of an Only Child before a school board meeting
Deliberately lewd: Erica Jong
Pornography is to art as prudery is to the censors
Reporting rights? Media freedom in the Balkans since the wars
Today the bulk of the media in the Balkans has “been bought by people with no history in, or understanding of, the media business; they promote narrow interests of their
Moving towards inequality: Jemimah Steinfeld and Hannah Leung
In China, social benefits are tied an antiquated system of household registration that restricts benefits to the place where people were born. As hundreds of millions leave the countryside to seek employment in the cities, they are left without official jobs, legal protection or school places for their children. Jemimah Steinfeld and Hannah Leung report
Escape from Eritrea: Ismail Einashe
As refugees flee one of the world’s most repressive and secretive regimes, Ismail Einashe talks to Eritreans who have reached the UK but who still worry about the risks of speaking out
13 Oct: Spies, secrets and lies
From China’s new security laws and South Korea’s new smartphone spies to Eritrea’s agents and the new fighters for free expression online. Where and what are the challenges today and how do they compare to the past?
Interview: Judy Blume and her battle against the bans
From the autumn issue of Index on Censorship magazine, US author Judy Blume talks to Vicky Baker about parents’ and teachers’ overly protective attitudes to young people’s feelings, and how she has spent the last 45 years tackling bans and censorship
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.