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Vatican: lovely art, terrific music - check it out!

Censorship in all its forms is headline news this week, with Google publishing the list of data requests made by governments (Iceland had no censorship last year, a redeeming feature of that island) and Canada telling Google it’s concerned about privacy issues.

Now, closer to home in Switzerland, public television TSR agrees to the Catholic Church’s request to remove what the church said were offending cartoons, reports Le Matin’s Viviane Menétrey. Cartoonist Philippe Becquelin, who goes by the name of Mix ‘n Remix, had prepared a series of cartoons about priests and sexual abuse for the TSR Infrarouge programme, but the Catholic Church in Switzerland asked that they be removed from the Internet, which TSR did.

Journalists have always had to work out the line between being informative and being offensive. Swiss laws about “honour” and smearing the name of a group or individual are pretty strict, so I’m not surprised. Large organizations are quick to snap at you if you say unpleasant things about them, whether true, untrue, a matter of fact or your opinion (bloggers beware!).

The problem with this kind of subtle censorship by threat of legal action is that we’re all left with the rose-coloured glasses views of the world public relations people like to prepare for us.

In the case of the Vatican, despite the Pope’s words about confronting the problem of sexual abuse, which is front page news in the New York Times, what we get is serenity. Nice, very nice, but it doesn’t really solve the problem.

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