Yes. And central governments have been quietly increasing their power over the media for the past several decades. Monopolistic control of mass communications may not be readily evident in nominally democratic societies, where there seem to be many different sources of information. Yet on closer inspection it turns out that virtually all the major media — those that reach the vast majority of people — promulgate essentially the same neocapitalist world view. This is because the so-called "free" press is owned by a handful of capitalistic media conglomerates. Such uniformity insures that any facts, concepts, or opinions that clash with or tend to discredit the fundamental principles of that world view are unlikely to reach a wide audience (see section D.3).

There are numerous ties between government, news magazines, and newspapers. Corporate interests dominate television and radio; and for reasons described earlier, the interests of major corporations largely coincide with those of the government. The tendency in recent years has been toward the absorption of small independent print media, especially newspapers, by conglomerates that derive their major profits from such industries as steel, oil, and telephone equipment. As Marilyn French notes, the effect of these conglomerates' control "is to warn communications media away from anything that might be disturbing, and toward a bland, best-of-all-possible-worlds point of view. Although people have a wide range of reading and viewing material to choose from, the majority of it offers the same kinds of distraction — fads and fashions, surface glitter — or tranquillisation: all problems are solvable, no serious injustice or evil is permitted to continue" [French, Op. Cit., p. 350]. In other words, people are granted ever-increasing access to an ever-decreasing range of "acceptable" ideas.

These trends represent an unofficial and unsystematic form of censorship. In the United States, however, the federal government has been extending official and systematic forms of censorship as well. Again, the Reagan Administration proceeded furthest in this regard. In 1983 alone, more than 28,000 speeches, articles, and books written by government employees were submitted to government censors for clearance. The Reagan government even set a precedent for restricting information that is not classified. This it accomplished by passing laws requiring all government employees with security clearances to sign Standard Form 189, which allows them to be prosecuted for divulging not only classified information but that which is "nonclassified but classifiable." The latter is a deliberately vague, Catch-22 category that has sufficient interpretative latitude to allow for the harassment of most would-be whistle-blowers [Curry, Op. Cit.].

The United States Information Agency (USIA), which sends scholars overseas as part of its AMPARTS programme of educational and cultural exchanges, has attempted to screen the political opinions of scholars it selects for foreign speaking engagements. In 1983 the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Operations criticised USIA officials for "violating the letter and spirit of its charter" in choosing its AMPARTS speakers on the basis of "partisan political ideology."

In early 1984 the USIA's policies became a national scandal when the Washington Post revealed that since late 1981 the USIA had been compiling a blacklist containing not only the names of prominent academics but of national figures, including Coretta Scott King, Congressman Jack Brooks, and former Senator Gary Hart. Under the Immigration, Naturalisation, and Nationality Act (known as "the McCarran Act") foreign nationals have been denied entry into the United States because of their political and ideological beliefs. Among the most notable among the thousands who have been so denied are Nobel Prize-winning authors Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Czeslaw Milosz, as well as author Carlos Fuentes, playwright Dario Fo, actress Franca Rame, novelist Doris Lessing, NATO Deputy Supreme Commander Nino Pasti, renowned Canadian writer Farley Mowat, American-born feminist writer Margaret Randall, and Hortensia Allende, widow of the former Socialist president of Chile, Salvador Allende.

In perhaps the most disturbing censorship development in recent years, the Reagan Administration used the powers of the Trading with the Enemy Act to place an embargo on magazines and newspapers from Cuba, North Vietnam, and Albania (but not China or the ex-Soviet Union), and confiscated certain Iranian books purchased by television journalists abroad. These materials were not embargoed because they contained American secrets, but simply because it was thought they might contain information the Administration did not want Americans to know [French, Op. Cit., p. 433].

Official censorship was also highly evident during the recent Persian Gulf massacre. In this one-sided conflict, the government not only severely curtailed the press's access to information about the war, restricting reporters to escorted "press pools," but to a large extent turned the major news media into compliant instruments of Administration propaganda. This was accomplished by creating competition between the TV networks and news services for the limited number of slots in the pools, thus making news departments dependent on the government's good will and turning news anchors into cheerleaders for the US-led slaughter.

Reporting on the Gulf War was also directly censored by the military, by news and photo agencies, or by both. For instance, when award-winning journalist Jon Alpert, a longtime NBC stringer, "came back from Iraq with spectacular videotape of Basra [Iraq's second largest city, population 800,000] and other areas of Iraq devastated by US bombing, NBC president Michael Gartner not only ordered that the footage not be aired but forbade Alpert from working for the network in the future" [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Extra, Special Issue on the Gulf War, 1991, p. 15].

As John R. Macarthur has documented, congressional approval for the war might not have been forthcoming without a huge preliminary propaganda and disinformation campaign designed to demonise Saddam Hussein and his troops. The centrepiece of this campaign — the now infamous story of Iraqi soldiers allegedly ripping premature Kuwaiti babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floor — was a total fabrication masterminded by an American public relations firm funded by the Kuwaiti government-in-exile and eagerly disseminated by the Administration with the help of a credulous and uncritical news establishment [John R. Macarthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, Hill & Wang, 1992; also, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, Common Courage Press, 1995].

These trends toward a system of official and unofficial censorship do not bode well for future freedom of speech and of the press. For they establish precedents for muzzling, intimidating, and co-opting the primary sources of public information — precedents that can be invoked whenever an administration finds it convenient. This is just one more piece of evidence that late capitalism is leading inexorably toward authoritarian government.