Rod Serling Quotes
Infinitely more taboos, on television.
Serling, Rod. Interview by Mike Wallace. The Mike Wallace Interview, ABC, 22 Sept. 1959.
The Masses was a left wing publication which the then Post Office officials decided were “dangerous”. Later, the Supreme Court would hold that there could not be this degree of political censorship by Post Office officials.
This seemingly logical inconsistency is actually typical of many nations and cultures that practice censorship. Freedom in this is a concept of a limited freedom—limited to what is reasonable, not harmful, not offensive. So all are free to behave within a circumscribed set of norms. By this logic, freedom is not being curtailed if the state acts to stop activity beyond those norms. Every nation accepts this principle to some extent. In America one “cannot should fire in a crowded theater” but there are very few other restrictions. But in Germany, Israel and other modern Industrial democracies there is censorship of material that promotes ethnic hatred whereas in the U. S. that is protected from censorship. In China many sites on the Internet have material that is regarded as inflammatory, or slanders the government and this is bad because people might lose confidence in their government. So freedom of speech and censorship issues are matters of degree with the United State being at one end of the scale and North Korea and Saudi Arabia being at the other end. China has been moving from the North Korean end of the scale towards the middle.
This was a description of the post WWII censorship in East Germany under the communists, but it applies to most political censorship in any country. The same dynamics functioned in the United States during both World Wars and during the red scare of McCarthyism.
Rodman Edward Serling was an American screenwriter, playwright, television producer, and narrator known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his anthology television series, The Twilight Zone. Serling was active in politics, both on and off the screen, and helped form television industry standards. He was known as the "angry young man" of Hollywood, clashing with television executives and sponsors over a wide range of issues including censorship, racism, and war.
