Emails to Index on Censorship This is my first email to the charity organisation Index on Censorship. They describe themselves as `forum for reporting, analysing and discussing the latest developments for freedom of speech’. They have their own website, magazine and provide support to goverments around the world. They run campaigns for change against any threats to freedom of speach by countries, buissnesses, media organisations or laws. They loby governments and have some of the best jounalists from around the world working for them. They are currently running campaigns and programs in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Tunisia and the UK. I thought they would provide a good anti censorship viewpoint in our documentary. This is an email I sent to them Alright. I'm making a documentary on media censorship and I would be great to get an interview with someone who works for index. I want to make a balanced documentary that focuses more on the morality and impacts of media censorship so it would be great to capture some of your views on Leverson, Twitter or whatever you want to talk about. It would be great to capture your stance you can talk about whatever you feel is relevant doesn't have to necessarily be topical. It might be a good chance to get your message to a new audience. Email me back if you want me to send over the interview questions. This was their reply
Hi Luis Could you please send me some more details. Where is the documentary likely to go out? And can you give me some more detail about your production company? Questions would be great too. Thanks Pam I emailed them back It's a BTEC media project made by Philistine Studios that will be go out online in February with hopes to maybe showing it at film festivals. We hoping to make a documentary that is hopefully a lot more balanced than a lot of the other censorship documentaries as we will feature both the benefits and disadvantages of media censorship. For example we will question whether media censorship ruins auidence's enjoyment of media projects, then we will question whether the argument that a lack of censorship is responsible
for tragedies like columbine and the batman killings. We want to spark a broader debate on media censorship. It would fit into the expository mode of documentary. I'm hoping to attract an older reformist audience as well as a younger audience also so this could be a good chance to get your organisations message to a new younger audience. The questions are quiet open broad so you can raise whatever point you would like to raise. I may ask more specific follow up questions depending on what answers you give. I also ask questions such as 'could you state the different forms of media censorship' so we can include the answers with other interviewee's answers in a vox pops style using montage editing. Don't worry if you don't have answers for all of the questions. There's a lot of questions and we don't expect everyone to answer all of them. Here are the questions: • How important do you think the media is in modern society. • What is media censorship? • Could you state the different forms of media censorship? • Could you state the different bodies that impose media censorship? • Why do you think the media is censored? • Do you think media censorship harms creativity/expression and how? • Do you think media censorship has ever suggnifficantly made worse a
media product and how? • Can the media more specifically films and television actually be held responsible for mass murder? • Do you think the media is hiding anything the public needs to know and could significantly effect an election? • Do you think media censorship has the power to lead to an autocratic state? And what role does it play? • How free do you think media is in the UK? • Do you think current media censorship is effective in the UK? We hope you would send someone over for an interview it would be great to have your views in our documentary. We will send you a copy prior to release so you can comment on anything you weren't happy with regarding the interview. We're reasonably flexible over dates it just cannot be between the December 26th and January 16th as I will be out of the country in columbia. We would prefer to film the interview instudio but we don't mind filming the interview on location as long as it's in London. I hope to hear from you soon.