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Mark, you must also consider degree and type of censorship.

Just because some forms of censorship may exist in two separate arenas, doesn't mean they are entirely equivalent. Even if they are equivalent in some ways they may still be distinct in other ways.

Censoring all of a newspaper's articles to mold to the Party line is obviously different than censoring only some articles, while still allowing other articles to be published which are in fact opposing viewpoints--and this is true regardless of your definition of censorship.

We have articles published in our major news media--Time magazine for example--that are highly critical of our government's policies. This simply didn't happen in the Soviet Union or under Mao-Tse Tung, nor does it happen in North Korea today. Also, our government doesn't arrest journalists who deviate from the "party line."

Can't you see the differences outlined above?

We have a variety of opinions expressed in our news media--quite a wide variety actually. In Red China, and in the USSR, the media expressed one point of view.


The mere fact that a wide variety of differing opinions are expressed here is a testament to the relative lack of censorship. Do you want to try to make the argument that we are censoring all but, say, 1,000 different viewpoints? At any rate, that's a helluva lot less censorship than censoring all but one viewpoint.