Obama’s greatest achievement is having seduced, co-opted and silenced much of liberal opinion in the US.
Barack Obama speaks in front of a screen showing his Twitter message.

US President Barack Obama speaks in front of a screen showing his Twitter message at the start of a ‘Twitter Town Hall’ July 6, 2011. Photograph: Getty Images.

How does political censorship work in liberal societies? When my film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia was banned in the United States in 1980, the broadcaster PBS cut all contact. Negotiations were ended abruptly; phone calls were not returned. Something had happened. But what? Year Zero had already alerted much of the world to Pol Pot’s horrors, but it also investigated the critical role of the Nixon administration in the tyrant’s rise to power and the devastation of Cambodia.

Six months later, a PBS official told me: ‘This wasn’t censorship. We’re into difficult political days in Washington. Your film would have given us problems with the Reagan administration. Sorry.’

In Britain, the long war in Northern Ireland spawned a similar, deniable censorship. The journalist Liz Curtis compiled a list of more than 50 television films that were never shown or indefinitely delayed. The word ‘ban’ was […]