Censorship and the whaling debate
I have been thinking more about recent events in the whaling debate. WDCS has an expert group of staff that have been inputting into and influencing the whaling debate for many years. WDCS helped block, it could even be said that we were instrumental in blocking, the so-called Irish Proposal - which many governments seem to have forgotten all about as they try to ram through their concessions to Japan's blackmail. The compromise that some people are trying to accomplish today bears many similarities and weaknesses of that previous attempt at allowing commercial whaling to resume. I think that some groups and governments would have been very happy if WDCS would have ‘shut up’ then, and no doubt, some feel the same today.
Since then WDCS has been subject to more of what I can only describe as censorship. I am not saying it’s coordinated, but during the last few months YouTube have taken down a whaling video that WDCS had produced (and was acceptable, it would appear, for nearly a year). The Faroese are blocking any emails originating from WDCS – seems they don’t like their people to hear an alternative view of the world to their own, - and now one of the BBC’s Magazines have insisted that we change an advert that we were running to remove comments about whaling being cruel – it appears that they are scared of being accused of allowing ‘campaigning’.
Where has the courage of debate gone? Are our media now to be simply mechanisms for bland, non-controversial comment? Are governments going to try and control what their people hear in case they may disagree with them?
We shall keep the debate going and we shall let you know if we encounter any problems. Of course, as long as we can do so, and no one stops us letting you know what’s going on ☺
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