Iranian Censorship
Here's an
interesting post on Iranian censorship. The interesting part about it is that they don't try to hide that they are censoring the magazines because they are simply blacking out whatever images they deem offensive. The surreal part of the post is that I learned that there are people whose job is to go through every issue of every magazine with a magic marker.
I brought some magazines with me when I went back to Sweden from Iran. The thing was that I was very surprised to begin with when I found copies of The Economist in the window of a newsstand near the Tehran University in Enqelab Square.
Since hotel rooms are boring, I picked up a couple of magazines – they even carried older issues. Went back and started reading. It was not until the second time I saw one of the black slabs of ink that I realized that the magazines were indeed censored! This sparked my interest, and I went back several times in the following days, and basically cleared out the store of foreign magazines. (It turned out that the shop owner had some uncensored issues of fashion magazines under the counter - which he very subtly offered me to purchase - and when I said that I’d rather buy the censored ones his jaw fell to the floor.)
