The Artful Jurist

Once again the Comedy Central TV network has found an episode of the animated show, South Park, too hot to handle.  The program, which is known for pushing the envelope and often exceeding the bounds of good taste, tried once more to put on screen a representation of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, and, just as it did the last time South Park's producers tried to do that, Comedy Central again censored it.  That included not only a censoring of the image (which the producers apparently self imposed) but also the network's bleeping of certain dialogue (some of which the producers said they had not bleeped themselved).

This follows certain "warnings" that an Islamic group made publicly, insinuating that the South Park producers could meet a similar fate to that of a Dutch filmmaker who was killed in 2004 after making a film that was critical of the way Muslim women were treated in certain Islamic groups.

Now, if you're wondering how this kind of censorship of free speech can possibly exist in the United States of America, where the First Amendment guarantees the right to spout off on just about anything you like (even hateful, unpopular, and scathingly critical opinions), I remind you of this:  The First Amendment says the government "shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech."  There's nothing in the Constitution that says private industry can't censor the speech it disseminates.