2012 Video of Bill Moyers on the Freedom to Read and the "Bane of Banning Books"; Ethics, Info, Tech: Contested Voices, Values, Spaces, July 3, 2025

Kip Currier; 2012 Video of Bill Moyers on the Freedom to Read and the "Bane of Banning Books"

Nobody writes more illuminating "I-didn't-know-THAT-about-that-person" obituaries than the New York Times. (I didn't know, for example, that Moyers was an ordained Baptist minister.) And, true to form, the Times has an excellent obituary detailing the service-focused life of Bill Moyers, who passed away on June 26, 2025 at the age of 91. 

The moment I learned of his death, my mind went to a 3-minute video clip of Moyers that I've continued to use in a graduate ethics course lecture I give on Intellectual Freedom and Censorship. The clip is from 2012 but the vital importance of libraries and the freedom to read that Moyers extolls is as timely and essential as ever, given the explosion of book bans and censorship besetting the U.S. right now.

Below is a description of the video clip and this is the video link:

"The Bane of Banned Books

September 25, 2012

In honor of the 30th anniversary of the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week,” Bill talks about the impact libraries have had on his youth, his dismay over book challenges in modern times, and why censorship is the biggest enemy of truth."

https://billmoyers.com/content/the-bane-of-banned-books/

What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films; The New York Times, July 6, 2023

 Niela Orr, The New York Times; What’s Lost When Censors Tamper With Classic Films

"Censors, like overzealous cops, can be too aggressive, or too simplistic, in their attempts to neutralize perceived threats. Whoever made the cut in the precinct scene, sparing the hero from saying unpleasant things, did nothing to remove other ethnic insults, from references to Italian Americans to the cops’ code names for their French targets: “Frog One” and “Frog Two.” It also becomes hilarious, in this sanitized context, to watch the film’s frequent nonlinguistic violence: A guy is shot in the face; a train conductor is blasted in the chest; a sniper misses Doyle and clips a woman pushing a stroller.

Surveillance, as the movie teaches us, is a game of dogged attention; focus too much on one thing and you miss a world of detail encircling it. Nit-picking old artworks for breaking today’s rules inevitably makes it harder to see the complete picture, the full context; we become, instead, obsessed with obscure metrics, legalistic violations of current sensibilities. And actively changing those works — continually remolding them into a shape that suits today’s market — eventually compromises the entire archival record of our culture; we’re left only with evidence of the present, not a document of the past."

Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech; The New York Times, August 7, 2018

Jack Nicas, The New York Times; 

Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech

"Apple, Google and Facebook this week erased from their services many — but not all — videos, podcasts and posts from the right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars site. And Twitter left Mr. Jones’s posts untouched.

The differing approaches to Mr. Jones exposed how unevenly tech companies enforce their rules on hate speech and offensive content. There are only a few cases in which the companies appear to consistently apply their policies, such as their ban on child pornography and instances in which the law required them to remove content, like Nazi imagery in Germany.

When left to make their own decisions, the tech companies often struggle with their roles as the arbiters of speech and leave false information, upset users and confusing decisions in their wake. Here is a look at what the companies, which control the world’s most popular public forums, allow and ban."