CENSORSHIP Should terror videos be banned?

This is a question which ultimately leaches into many areas of the debate around media regulation:

• does it matter if effects cannot be proven? The BBFC explicitly justify their work by arguing that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"
• given that publicity is what such terror organisations as Isis are seeking, should the media self-censor ...
• ... or be forced to censor the graphic videos that are causing worldwide headlines and making this organisation a global brand?
• Should OfCom have the power to block (or censure/fine) non-UK media that enable this content over here? Fox News (USA) has caused ripples by re-posting a full, unedited video of a murder ... and this link has been widely passed around and promoted by Isis supporters
• UK newspapers have embedded extreme
• Mrs Thatcher memorably used the phrase "oxygen of publicity" to describe what terrorists desired - her solution, when TV regulators (both the IBA, soon scrapped, and the BBC: Death on the Rock and Real Lives rows) refused to bow to enormous pressure (a typical moral panic whipped up by her press supporters), was to ban 'extremists' from being heard on TV/radio
• media resistance to this led to John Major quietly repealing the law ... will we see a similar approach in 2015 and beyond as clamour grows now for similar action to banish Islamic extermists from the 'airwaves'?

I'll post further links; for now: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/04/fox-news-shows-isis-video-jordan-pilot.

Troubles with Northern Ireland

No, the post title wasn't an example of poor writing ...  its a reference to the so-called 'Troubles' (a nice ideological, successfully hegemonic sleight of hand to diminish the status of the combat that took place in NI) and the issues that have been raised over the years whenever the terrestrial broadcasters tried to cover this in a fair-handed fashion.

Great article on this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2013/may/14/the-fall-northern-ireland-troubles.

Sample paragraph:

Until the Scottish question, though, it was in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, that the tension between UK remit and viewers in a constituent nation was at its greatest. The word behind the BBC's first initial was explosive to many nationalist viewers and yet the loyalist audience was often appalled by what it perceived as republican sympathies in some programmes. These irresolvable pressures led to such crises as the events in the summer of 1985, when a documentary in the Real Lives series, which featured Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, was postponed for four months by the BBC governors under pressure from the Conservative government. Three years later, the Thatcher government failed in its attempt to prevent transmission of the Thames TV documentary Death on the Rock, which investigated the killing by the SAS of three IRA members in Gibraltar, but, probably not coincidentally, Thames later lost its ITV franchise through a new Thatcherite bidding process.

BBC controversies: Real Lives 1985

There's a useful Wiki on BBC controversies.
You can see a 4min BBC News report from the time here.
The BBC bowed to gov pressure and banned it; BBC staff then walked out on a one-day strike; the BBC announced it would be screened some time later, with several cuts made.
Poor contrast with the IBA, who stood up to very similar pressure over the DoTR doc and broadcast it uncut.
Archive material has been released under the FoI Act, after a Guardian application, in this blog.