Censorship

It’s very common for music videos to be censored, especially in modern society. In the past MTV has suffered from negative criticism saying that it’s too politically correct and sensitive, meaning they censor too much of their programmes. The Parents Television Council argued that most of the censored material on MTV is easily discernible because of the context in which it is presented.




In the 1980's media group’s criticised MTV over music videos that were claimed to have explicit images of Satan, since then MTV has developed a strict policy on refusing to air videos that may have religious taboos, for instance MTV had to ban the video for "Megalomaniac" by Incubus. In today’s society all ethnic or racist slurs are censored in music videos and programmes making MTV more diversity aware for all people.


MTV censors music videos to remove references of drugs, sex, violence, weapons, racism, homophobia or advertising. It also completely censors swearing and anything that may be considered copyright. An example of this would be in the song "Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance, there are lyrics such as "gun", "murder", "shirt" and "pay", they are censored due to the attacks on a high school in Virginia. Also "This Love" by Maroon 5 had the words "coming" and "sinking" edited out of the lyrics because of the context of the song.


MTV also moves certain music videos onto a late night rotation in a censored format, an example of this would be "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-a-Lot. Similarly Madonna's "Erotica" was aired on MTV only after midnight due to its dark and sexual scenes. In an interview, Madonna said she agreed with MTV's opinion of the video by saying, “I know that the themes I'm exploring in the video are not for children, so I understand that they can't play it earlier.”


After really looking into what censorship consists of, i have realised that if we were to release our video on MTV, the censorship would heavily apply to our video. We are using a child actor in our video, in which there will be some mild drug abuse in order to fit with MGMT's genre which is psychedelic rock. It’s more than likely our video would have to be edited to be shown or MTV or in a more extreme case not be shown until after the water shed hours.