ABSTRACT
In discussing the debate about the effects of the mass media and the nature of censorship in Britain, one meets again both a countervailing force and a contradiction. A few centuries ago censorship was chiefly political or religious, or both. Those kinds are not dead but work rather differently these days. From the mid-nineteenth century or somewhat earlier sex, sexual censorship, came to the fore — in a society which even in its more ‘respectable’ groups secretly practised some of the grossest sexual practices and abuses. Censorship on social-class grounds is rather less common than it used to be; here again, the Lady Chatterley trial of 196o was probably something of a watershed. A traditional British example of indirect censorship is blackballing by a whisper in someone’s ear. The most common, evident and wide-ranging type of censorship runs from the sensibly moral through the in-bitten puritanical to the ideological.
