"Unnecessary Censorship"

My wife shared this clip with me from Jimmy Kimmel Live. I don't watch the show, but I know he's as big a fan of LOST as I am, and has covered much of the finale according to his style. This clip is from a segment called "Unnecessary Censorship," in which he takes clips from TV shows and bleeps perfectly innocent words in otherwise innocent sentences to create vulgar—and hilarious—results.



The interesting thing about this with respect to media—I can't let you off without a media lesson—is that we censor media in order to make it more modest. And while young children certainly would not have the background to understand what the bleeps mean, virtually anyone else would.

This includes children as young as elementary school age, assuming they're attending school or otherwise around kids of their age or older. Honestly, our kids are exposed to enough profanity for them to understand the bleeps. If that is true, then they are also able to fill in the blanks.

Jimmy Kimmel effectively points out the pointlessness of such censorship. In reality, the only people who benefit from such censorship do not watch media that requires it. The only thing bleeping does is make the message less clear, and the sentence more vulgar.

Let's not get carried away!