TV Censorship and Conservative/Liberal Bias

This week, like many people I begun thinking about making information about civil rights and its legacy and how we can make it as accessible as possible, to people of all ages. Of course we all know the power and the beauty of the internet; youtube, google, wikipedia. All these search engines and info sites means pretty much everything is more accessible in the 21st century. The problem I have (and I think other people touched on this in class) is that there has to be a trigger or a key fact or point of interest that makes people go searching about information on civil rights or indeed ANY subject in the first place. There has to be some driving force or thirst for knowledge to make people instigate research of their own. And like we said in class, Classens book whilst being physically accessible to everyone, (meaning its a book and it exists) is more commonly used as a college text rather than something you would see sitting on the front shelves of barnes and noble or in a times book review that encourages the public to buy it. I agree that education of people through television is one of, if not THE most powerful form of expressing opinion or informing about news events next to the internet and we should utilise it to our complete advantage. However, I find that just like the Mississippi tv station WLBT TV in the 50's we still live in a world of televisual censorship. Maybe not to the same degree of preventing african americans on tv - we have come a long way since then. But I have no doubt there are many documentaries out there about civil rights that got made but not shown. My own personal experience of TV censorship comes from my parents. My mom and dad have both worked for the BBC for the last 25 years, my mum working as a post production script editor and the amount of unaired tv programs that crossed her desk that were eventually cast aside by the BBC powers that be because of their controversial content is staggering. (In particular a rather disturbing one about the other sides of micheal jackson but thats besides the point)

Furthermore, still there are programs made by smaller production companies about underepresented groups that are tossed aside by the BBC channels 1 and 2, (most recently a program about mexican illegal immigrants attempting to get into the US that they cut because it didnt fit their demographic) The BBC is the most conservative of all British broadcasting companies. Channel 4 however, is considered the most liberal TV channel that airs award winning documentaries and programs that would never be aired by the overtly conservative BBC. In this segregation of TV demographics, does this mean many documentarys or information programs are being made inaccessible on purpose to protect audiences? This of course must be the same for the United States, Im not sure myself but there must be certain channels that air what they view as suitable depending on where they sit politically, anyone know which channels have political bias's??? The truth is we can make educational documentaries accessible, but there is still underepresentation out there in what we perceive to be a free world and generally a liberal society.