For starters, I suggest reading up on approaches to censorship by societies outside our Greco-Roman tradition. Because it turns out that there are different ways of skinning a cat.

How different? China’s constitution approves censorship; their laws delimit it; they practice it openly; they respond to critics of censorship; their censor is China’s Noam Chomsky– their leading public intellectual–so smart that three Presidents in succession have promoted him from an obscure college professor to Xi’s constant traveling companion. They’ve had Chief Censors for 2200 years and he’s the incumbent.

How better? Though the Chinese bitch and moan about censorship (youngsters call it oppressive; mid-careerists say it’s balanced; old folk say it’s waaaay too permissive), the end result of their public censorship is that 80% of them trust their media. And they’re smarter, better educated, and more widely traveled than us and have CNN and the BBC.

An alarmingly low number of Americans say they trust the media. Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public’s view of other institutions according to a study by the Media Insight Project, a partnership of The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute. The poll of 2,014 adults was conducted Feb. 18-March 21 with funding from the American Press Institute. It used a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods, and later interviewed online or by phone.

[An alarmingly low number of Americans say they trust the media. By Carole Feldman and Emily Swanson, Associated Press Apr 19, 2016
https://www.businessinsider.com/ap-poll-just-6-percent-of-people-say-they-trust-the-media-2016-4%5D.

I examine this more carefully in this article, The China Hoax, which you are free to republish: https://www.unz.com/article/the-china-hoax/