Banned in the Media: A Reference Guide to Censorship in the Press, Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and the Internet,
By Herbert N. Foerstel

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Introduction
The 1996 Oxford Modern English Dictionary defines the "media" as "the main means of mass communication (esp. newspapers and broadcasting)." The 1995 Cambridge Paperback Encyclopedia ( David Crystal , ed., 2d ed., 1995) says "media" is "a collective term for television, radio, cinema, and the press." This book will use these standard definitions, with one modification: the inclusion of the Internet, the newest and most controversial form of mass communication.

There is little doubt that the media have overwhelmed books as the preferred source of information and entertainment worldwide, and the United States is both the primary producer and the primary consumer of the media product. A recent study conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and the New York communications investment house, Veronis Suhler, produced some startling figures. The media business has become one of the twelve largest industries in the United States. Profits are high; operating margins range from 5.4 percent for the emerging interactive digital media to more than 16 percent for broadcasters. Several of the big newspapers do even better. The expectation is that the growth rate of newspaper revenues will double between 1995 and the year 2000, and the other media will do almost as well. 1

More interesting is the data indicating the stranglehold that the media have on the American public. The ordinary American spends 3,400 hours a year consuming the media output. That represents almost 40 percent of our lives, more time than we spend sleeping and far more time than we spend working. Radio and television represent 80 percent of our media consumption. Our reading occupies about an hour a day, half of it for newspapers. By the year 2000, according to the study, we will be reading even less, watching television even more, and spending more time on the Internet. 2

Little wonder, then, that we hear so much about the power of the media and its influence on everything from morality to politics. The current problem is not the growing media power, but the narrowing corporate cabal that wields it. In 1983 Ben Bagdikian, then journalism dean at the University of California, Berkeley, published The Media Monopoly, which revealed that at least half of all media business was controlled by just fifty corporations. By 1987, when his second edition appeared, he reported that just twenty-nine corporations exercised that power, and by the time of his fourth edition in 1992, that number had shrunk to twenty. Bagdikian noted a similar evolution in newspapers and magazines. Of the 1,700 daily newspapers in this country, 98 percent were local monopolies and most of their combined circulation was controlled by fewer than fifteen corporations. Among magazines, Time, Inc., alone was responsible for 40 percent of industry revenues. 3

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Bagdikian wrote,

[A] shrinking number of large media corporations now regard monopoly, oligopoly, and historic levels of profit as not only normal, but as their earned right. In the process, the usual democratic expectations for the media -- diversity of ownership and ideas -- have disappeared as the goal of official policy, and worse, as a daily experience of a generation of American viewers and readers. . . . It's no way to maintain a lively marketplace of ideas, which is to say it is no way to maintain a democracy. 4

Bagdikian's trailblazing research and widely praised 1987 edition of The Media Monopoly were virtually ignored by the media. His explanation of why the major media had failed to discuss the disadvantages of media consolidation was simple: editors were not interested in these problems because they were all in the newspaper consolidation business themselves.

Indeed, the media's failure to address the most significant problem in its industry caused that very issue to be declared the "most censored news story of 1987" by the prestigious Project Censored. Every year since 1977, Project Censored, based at Sonoma State University, has published its list of the news issues or "stories" that have been most heavily suppressed during the previous year. The judges who selected the media monopoly story as the "most censored" during 1987 included John Kenneth Galbraith, Bill Moyers, and Judith Krug. Communications professor Carl Jensen, originator of Project Censored, said the judges selected the media monopoly story because it was the root cause for underreporting generally. "We have fewer sources, fewer outlets and more control by fewer people," said Jensen. 5

The problem of media monopolies has worsened in recent years, but it continues to be ignored by the media. Project Censored's latest edition, Censored 1997. The News That Didn't Make the News, featured an article, "Free the Media," that literally mapped out the four giant corporations that control the major television news divisions: the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and the Cable News Network (CNN). Author Mark Miller notes that two of the four holding corporations are defense contractors (both involved in nuclear production), and the other two purvey entertainment. Miller concludes that we are thus the subjects of a "national entertainment state," in which the news and much of our amusement are provided by the two most powerful industries in the United States.

Miller presents an elaborate chart that maps the tentacles of General Electric, Time Warner, Disney/Cap Cities and Westinghouse, the four media giants. He says a glance at each chart reveals why, say, Tom Brokaw might have difficulty covering stories critical of nuclear power, or ABC News will no longer be likely to do an exposé of Disney's policies, or, indeed, why none of the media is willing to touch the biggest story of them all -- the media monopoly itself.

Miller says such maps "suggest the true causes of those enormous ills that now dismay so many Americans: the universal sleaze and 'dumbing down,' the flood tide of corporate propaganda, the terminal inanity of U.S. politics." He warns that "the same gigantic players that control the elder media are planning shortly to absorb the Internet, which could be transformed from a thriving common wilderness into an immeasurable de facto cyberpark for corporate interests, with all the dissident voices exiled to sites known only to the activists." Only a new, broad-based antitrust movement can save the media, according to Miller. 6

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The media have always been the captive of religion and politics, scorned and manipulated by both in ways beyond anything suffered by book publishers. A recent example of the former is the boycott launched by Baptists against the Walt Disney Company. On June 18, 1997, the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas, Texas overwhelmingly approved a resolution urging the denomination's 15.7 million members to boycott all presentations and products bearing the Disney name and everything produced by the vast Disney conglomerate that includes Miramax Films, ABC television, ESPN, E! and Disney cable channels and Hyperion Books. The primary objection expressed by the Baptists was Disney's support for homosexuals, as represented by ABC's sitcom "Ellen," whose star is an admitted lesbian and Disney's willingness to grant health benefits to the partners of homosexual employees.

The Baptists admit that the effectiveness of the boycott may not be immediately evident, but Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, said, "The Crusades were not a high point in public relations for the church, but they give people a feeling of accomplishment, and this boycott may do the same for many Americans." 7

Banned in the U.S.A. ( 1994) examined censorship in book publishing, but only in the context of schools and libraries. This book may be regarded as a sequel to Banned in the U.S.A., but there are significant differences. Banned in the Media examines censorship in six formats -newspapers, magazines, radio, television, motion pictures and the Internet-in a wide variety of contexts. Whereas individual books can be plucked from school classrooms or library shelves by nervous school or library officials, much of the media product is ephemeral, and its censorship is wielded with a broader brush.

An important distinction between my methodologies for analyzing books and the media is the manner in which incidents of censorship are tallied and compared. The number of times a particular book title is banned from school curricula or removed from library shelves can be tallied and a list of the most banned books can be assembled, but much of the media does not admit to such particularization. The wide and disparate variety of media formats make it impossible to analyze statistically and rank incidents across the entire media. Frequently, it is even difficult to isolate and identify the origin of media censorship.

Serial publications, particularly magazines, are uniquely vulnerable to newsstand or convenience store boycotts. They also suffer censorship of individual articles or issues. Motion pictures, like books, have been banned in ways that allow statistical analysis, but the monolithic

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THE DEATH PENALTY: A WORLD-WIDE PERSPECTIVE
By ROGER HOOD

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1 Overview
The Present Status of the Abolitionist Movement

Despite the fact that the movement to abolish the death penalty got under-way in the mid-nineteenth century, by 1965 when Norval Morris reported to the United Nations, only 12 countries (plus a few constituent states) had completely abolished it, and a further 11 countries had abolished it for ordinary crimes in peacetime. Since then the abolitionist position has been embraced by an ever increasing number of countries.

Any review of the situation with regard to the abolition of the death penalty on a world-wide basis over the last thirty years is complicated by the fact that, during this period, the political map of the world has changed considerably. In particular, many newly independent states have emerged, some of them, of course, being fragmentary parts of formerly unified states. During the thirty years since 1965, 58 countries have abolished capital punishment: 46 of them absolutely for all crimes, and 12 of them for 'ordinary crimes'. Several of these countries had been, at the time they abolished the death penalty, abolitionist de facto, meaning that they had not executed anybody for at least ten years.

The pace of change towards abolition has further increased in the six years since the first edition of this survey was published in 1989. Since then, 25 countries have abolished capital punishment, 23 for all crimes, whether in peacetime or in war. In comparison, 35 countries abolished the death penalty (25 absolutely and 10 for ordinary crimes) in the 23 years between the survey undertaken for the United Nations by Norval Morris, and that carried out in 1988 for the first edition of this report. In other words, the annual average rate at which countries have abolished the death penalty has increased from 1.5 to 4 per year, or nearly three times as many. A list of all abolitionist and retentionist countries with the date of abolition and of the last execution, in those which are abolitionist or abolitionist de facto, can be found in Appendix 1.

Amongst the retentionist states, at least 30 have not executed anybody during the last ten years, and often far longer. Thirteen of these countries have reached this abolitionist de facto status only since 1989. However, 10 countries which had been previously considered de facto abolitionist moved in the opposite direction by resuming executions and were still considered to be retentionist in 1995. Three more countries, and two states of the United States of America, which had abolished the death penalty, re-instated it, although none of them have yet carried out any executions.

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Although the world-wide movement towards abolition has proceeded at an increasing pace, it has to be recognized that this has not occurred evenly across the globe. Many of the recent abolitionist states are in Africa south of the Sahara, with some in Asia--regions where very few countries were abolitionist six years ago. On the other hand, there has been a marked resistance to appeals for change, indeed official support for capital punishment, in various parts of the world. Furthermore, the creation of 15 independent states, all but one of them retaining the death penalty, within the boundaries of the former Soviet Union, inevitably distorts any comparisons between 1988 and 1995.

By the end of December 1995 there were 58 totally abolitionist countries, 14 abolitionist for ordinary crimes, 30 abolitionist de facto, and 90 still retentionist (see Appendix 1). Bearing in mind that the countries are not necessarily the same in 1988 as they were in 1995.

Even though, by the end of 1995, less than a third of all separate political entities had completely abolished the death penalty de jure, more than half had abolished it either in law or in practice.

Of great significance has been the adoption of protocols to conventions on human, civil, and political rights which endorse the abolition of the death penalty as an international goal. In December 1982 the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), article 1 of which provides for the abolition of the death penalty in peacetime. Article 2, however, does allow a state to make provision in its law for the death penalty in time of war or of imminent threat of war. Seven years later, in December 1989, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Article 1 of the Optional Protocol states: 'No one within the jurisdiction of a State party to the present Optional Protocol shall be executed'. Although article 2, like the Sixth Protocol to the ECHR, allows a reservation to be made 'which provides for the application of the death penalty in time of war pursuant to a conviction for a most serious crime of a military nature committed during wartime', the reservation can only be made at the time of ratification or accession. In June 1990, the General Assembly of the Organisation of American States adopted the Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights to Abolish the Death Penalty (ACHR). Article 1 calls upon states to abstain from the use of the death penalty, but does not impose an obligation on them to erase it from the statute book. Thus de facto abolitionist countries may also ratify the Protocol. None of these instruments, of course, fully endorse the complete abolition of the death penalty.

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Feminist Interpretation of the Bible,
Book by Letty M. Russell

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Introduction: Liberating the Word

In 1976 The Liberating Word: A Guide to Nonsexist Interpretation of the Bible was published by a small NCCC Task Force on Sexism in the Bible. In the introduction to that book I wrote that the message of the Bible can become a liberating word for those who hear and act in faith but that this same message also needs to be liberated from sexist interpretations which continue to dominate our thoughts and actions. This small book was a "premature" guide to feminist interpretation of the Bible. 1 As the contributions to feminist interpretation have continued to grow in volume and maturity, it has become abundantly clear that the scriptures need liberation, not only from existing interpretations but also from the patriarchal bias of the texts themselves. The more we learn about feminist interpretation, the more we find ourselves asking, with Katharine Sakenfeld, "How can feminists use the Bible, if at all? What approach to the Bible is appropriate for feminists who locate themselves within the Christian community? How does the Bible serve as a resource for Christian feminists?" [ 55 ]. 2

This collection of essays does not pretend to have the answer. Rather, it continues the tradition of the earlier book by inviting a wide readership of women and men to share in discussion of these questions. Discussions of feminist perspectives are not taking place in the academy alone. In all parts of the church, many women and not a few men seek ways of liberating the word to speak the gospel in the midst of the oppressive situations of our time. It is hoped that FEMINIST INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE will provide resources for collective discussion in Bible study, teaching, and preaching as well as personal study and meditation. As we join together in our study of the Bible, we may even be surprised by the fresh insights and challenges that arise as we search out the meaning of the texts for our own lives.

Fresh insights are needed as the rising consciousness of women and people in the Third World or in other oppressed circumstances leads them to challenge accepted biblical interpretations that reinforce patriarchal domination. From this perspective the Bible needs to be liberated from its captivity to one-sided white, middle-class, male interpretation. It needs liberation from privatized and spiritualized interpretations that avoid God's concern for justice, human wholeness, and ecological responsibility; it needs liberation from abstract, doctrinal interpretations that remove the biblical narrative from its concrete social and political context in order to change it into timeless truth.

Feminist and liberation theologians and biblical scholars have begun working on this process of liberating the word. Reading the Bible from the perspective of the oppressed, they note the bias in all biblical interpretation and call for clear advocacy of those who are in the greatest need of God's mercy and help: the dominated victims of society. These scholars lift up not only the personal but also the social, political, and economic dimensions of the biblical narratives, as they try to reconstruct the hidden history of the "losers." Thus they seek to keep the prophetic and liberating story of God's concern for the oppressed and for the mending of creation alive among communities of faith and faithfulness.

Feminists find that even here the going is difficult, for the biblical texts were written in the context of patriarchal cultures. It is not even clear that the category of the oppressed is "generic" in the worldview of patriarchy [ 118 ]. Thus the issue continues to be whether the biblical message can continue to evoke consent in spite of its patriarchal captivity.

The Liberating Word
Perhaps those who wrote The Liberating Word were overly optimistic about the possibility of nonsexist interpretation, but they were certainly not so about the growing concern for feminist interpretation in church and school. In the last ten years, such biblical scholars as Phyllis Trible and Elisabeth Fiorenza have published major volumes of interpretation. 3 All the bibliographical references in a book such as this can hardly do justice to the ever-increasing number of books and articles related to this topic. The urgency felt by the original task force in sharing some early reflections with the wider community of faith has been felt by women and men who consider the Bible authoritative for their faith, as well as by those who wish to challenge the impact of patriarchal tradition on the lives of women.

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Feminist biblical interpretation has developed into two interdependent areas of research: inclusive language and inclusive interpretation. Both areas have one thing in common: They are carried forward by cooperating groups of women and men who see their work not only as a scholarly enterprise but also as a collective effort to bring about change in the thoughts, values, and actions of religious groups in the United States and abroad. The original task force was created because of a concern for the interpretation of the Bible that takes place through translation. The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. holds the copyright for the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and continues to sponsor the committee on revisions. Concern for representation of feminist scholarship on the translation committee has led to the appointment of Phyllis Bird, Cheryl Exum, and Katharine Sakenfeld to the committee currently at work on revisions of the Hebrew scriptures. At the same time, subsequent NCCC task forces have developed An InclusiveLanguage Lectionary for use in worship and preaching.

Like the publication of the RSV before it, the Lectionary has sparked a storm of protest. It has made substitutions for key biblical words and concepts: God the Father [and Mother]; God the SOVEREIGN ONE; Realm of God. 4 These may or may not turn out to be the most imaginative renderings, but the greatest outcry has to do with "changing the canon" and thus weakening its "authority." Detractors seldom notice that The Living Bible and The Good News Bible are also paraphrases, or that the Reader's Digest version is also an alteration by deletion of the RSV. The difference is that inclusive changes have to do with imaging God as transcendent of male sexual characteristics or as inclusive of both male and female characteristics. The Lectionary confronts the seemingly divinely sanctioned patriarchal view of the world that is the basis of religious security for many people [ 64 ].

This book is the fruit of the second stream, cooperative research relative to the inclusive interpretation of the Bible. It seeks particularly to affirm women so that they are acknowledged as fully human partners with men, sharing in the image of God.

Liberating the Word
A group of feminists in the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature decided to make use of the annual meetings to develop a project of feminist hermeneutics (theories of interpretation), seeking to clarify for themselves and for others the distinctive character of feminist interpretation. The participants in the project represented women and men who were concerned about liberating the word from its patriarchal bondage.

The question of liberation hermeneutics has been on the agenda of the Liberation Theology Working Group of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature for some time. It was the theme of the papers in 1979 and has been the central research topic since 1981. In 1980 a particular focus on feminist hermeneutics was added after an SBL centennial session on "The Effects of Women's Studies on Biblical Studies," moderated by Phyllis Trible. The recognition of the marginalization of women in the biblical field provided an impetus for cooperation among feminist and liberation scholars in asking one another how they do or do not do biblical interpretation differently from the mainstream of biblical study and interpretation.

The published papers from this 1980 meeting 5 indicate that there is a second marginality experienced by feminist biblical scholars: They are marginal to a great deal of feminist scholarship because they continue to uphold the value of the biblical materials in spite of their patriarchal bias against women. For this reason it was important to work together as biblical scholars and theologians to reflect on a particular area of activity: feminist interpretation of the Bible. There had been considerable activity. Some members of this 1981 session had been at work in this area for more than ten years and welcomed a chance to reflect together on this action. They were asking, "What is it that we are doing as feminists when we interpret the Bible? Is there something distinctive about this interpretation? If so, what is it?"

Perhaps the one area that could be agreed upon from the beginning was that, like the nineteen women suffragists who worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton from 1895 to 1898 to publish The Woman's Bible, these women are searching today for a feminist interpretation of the Bible that is rooted in the feminist critical consciousness that women and men are fully human and fully equal. This consciousness is opposed to teachings and actions that reinforce the social system that oppresses women and other groups in society. In her contribution to the centennial session, Dorothy Bass reminded us that Stanton published The Woman's Bible because the keystone of misogynist religion and of women's oppression is the Bible. 6 Then as now, there are those who find the Bible irrelevant or hopelessly sexist and others who find feminist critique ungodly, but many women and men struggle to combine a feminist consciousness and serious consideration of the biblical witness with the story of God's presence in the lives of women and men.

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In order to learn about feminist hermeneutics through reflection on action, two feminist exegetical papers were prepared and discussed at the Dallas meeting. (These papers were later published in revised form in the Fall 1983 issue of Semeia, devoted to feminist hermeneutics and the Bible, edited by Mary Ann Tolbert.) Sharon Ringe says that her paper on the transfiguration, " Luke 9:28-36: The Beginning of an Exodus," is an elaboration of Sakenfeld's third option; it looks at a particular pericope from a liberation perspective. Her conclusion is that the exegesis is feminist, not in the way she used techniques of historical and literary criticism but in "the concerns, questions, and sensitivities" she brought to the task.

In contrast, Cheryl Exum's paper, "You Shall Let Every Daughter Live: A Study of Exodus 1:8-2:10," was on a text specifically chosen because the courageous action of women is the beginning of the liberation of Israel from Egypt (fourth option). The actions of the midwives and Pharaoh's daughter become extraordinary as we see the risks they took in opposing patriarchy and hear this old story of liberation in new ways.

What did we learn from reflection on these concrete actions of exegesis by feminist scholars? One thing is that, in the words of Phyllis Trible, "feminist hermeneutics embraces a variety of methodologies and disciplines." 8 A second is that the interpretative bias and understanding is built into the exegesis itself, so that it is impossible to delay the feminist or liberation critical perspective until the exegesis is finished, as a sort of theological afterthought about meaning or relevance. 9 Third, as Fiorenza has pointed out, we must seek feminist hermencutics not just in ways of dealing with the biblical material but in the criteria for evaluating one's approach to scripture. 10

The New York meeting in 1982 was based on a series of responses to Fiorenza's own proposals for evaluating one's approach to scripture. We attempted to move beyond feminist critical perspective and options for biblical exegesis to the issue of criteria for feminist interpretation. In addition to Fiorenza's chapter (published in The Challenge of Liberation Theology) and the circulated responses of the panel, we also considered Rosemary Ruether's first chapter from Sexism and God Talk, entitled "Feminist Theology: Methodology, Sources, and Norms." The criteria were not spelled out in great detail, but it is possible to identify what Ruether calls the "critical feminist principle" as it is found in these two papers. For Ruether, the "critical principle of feminist theology is the affirmation and promotion of the full humanity of women. Whatever denies, diminishes, or distorts the full humanity of women is, therefore, to be appraised as not redemptive" [ 115 ]. 11 Fiorenza maintains that "only the nonsexist and nonandrocentric traditions of the Bible and the nonoppressive traditions of biblical interpretation have the theological authority of revelation" [ 128 ]. 12

Both statements immediately raise the issue of our understanding of biblical authority and canon, as the panelists were quick to point out. The whole canon is to be taken seriously, especially because of the possibility of the Bible's use as a tool for the oppression of women. But it is not considered to function as the Word of God, evoking consent or faith, if it contributes to the continuation of racism, sexism, and classism. In her "Response to the Responders" in New York, Fiorenza asserted that this was not an issue of authority but rather of the political struggles of women against oppression. 13 She seeks to shift the criteria of biblical criticism from a focus on what is adequate to the human condition and appropriate to scriptures to what is adequate to historical-literary methods and appropriate to the struggle of the oppressed for liberation. 14

From a feminist liberation perspective, feminist theory of interpretation begins with a different view of reality, asking what is appropriate in light of "personally and politically reflected experience of oppression and liberation." 15 Interpretation does not begin with dogmatic statements about the authority of scripture and canon but rather--as we did in the hermeneutic project--with feminist perspective and praxis. Nevertheless, as we arrive at a critical feminist perspective that says the biblical text can only be considered to function as God's word, compelling our faith, when it is nonsexist, we ourselves have raised the question of authority [ 137 ]. The dogmatic and patriarchal view of authority, as timeless truth handed down, is being challenged by what Fiorenza calls a "paradigm of emancipatory praxis." 16

Issues that have been raised in areas of experience, biblical authority, and models of interpretation need to be pursued in a continuing search, not for an abstract synthesis but for a theory of interpretation that is rooted in the concrete particularities of oppression and liberation, such as those expressed by Jewish feminist writers and writers from Black, Hispanic, and Asian perspectives [ 30 , 111 ]. 17 There is much to learn about paradigms of authority from communities of oppressed people such as the Black community, whose members listened to the Bible not for doctrinal propositions but for "experiences which could inspire, convince and enlighten." 18 What is needed is not the old questions and paradigms of authority but the development of new questions and paradigms of authority, which are functional in the communities of struggle wrestling with the biblical text.

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