In the United States, Standards and Practices (also referred to as Broadcast Standards and Practices) is the name traditionally given to the department at a television network which is responsible for the moral, ethical, and legal implications of the program that network airs. - Wikipedia
The TED Talks is a phenomenon not without its critics. One issue is a possible standard that pitches and panders to an elite audience. Another is the practice of banning Talks because some vocal groups find the topics or ideas objectionable.
Published on Dec 30, 2013. Benjamin Bratton, Associate Professor of Visual Arts at UCSD and Director of The Center for Design and Geopolitics at CALIT2, asks: Why don’t the bright futures promised in TED talks come true? Professor Bratton attacks the intellectual viability of TED, calling it placebo politics, middlebrow megachurch infotainment, and the equivalent of right-wing media channels. Does TED falsely present problems as simply puzzles to be solved by rearranging the pieces?
BANNED: Rich People Don’t Create Jobs
Via Business Insider: “As the war over income inequality wages on, super-rich Seattle entrepreneur Nick Hanauer has been raising the hackles of his fellow 1-percenters, espousing the contrarian argument that rich people don’t actually create jobs. The position is controversial — so much so that TED is refusing to post a talk that Hanauer gave on the subject. National Journal reports today that TED officials decided not to put Hanauer’s March 1 speech up online after deeming his remarks “too politically controversial” for the site…”.
TIME: Was Nick Hanauer’s TED Talk on Income Inequality Too Rich for Rich People?
FORBES: The Real Reason That TED Talk was Censored? Its Shoddy and Dumb
TED’s Chris Anderson Offers Up Tepid Defense For Blocking Hanauer Video
BANNED: The Science Delusion
TED’s Chris Anderson censored Rupert Sheldrake, along with Graham Hancock, and removed this video and Hancock’s from the TEDx YouTube channel. They dared question the Scientistic Orthodoxy, and for that they have been publicly castigated and defamed.
More on the controversy:
Dear TED, Is it ‘bad science’ or a ‘Game of Thrones’?
Chris Anderson: TED, censorship, consciousness, militant atheists, and pseudo science!
Deepak Chopra: Reply to Chris Anderson, TED …
Deepak Chopra: TED relents, but whose hash has been settled?
BUT NOT BANNED: Dawkins on militant atheism
AND NOT BANNED: Chopra 2002 talk at TED
AND NOT BANNED: How economic inequality harms societies
We feel instinctively that societies with huge income gaps are somehow going wrong. Richard Wilkinson charts the hard data on economic inequality, and shows what gets worse when rich and poor are too far apart: real effects on health, lifespan, even such basic values as trust.
The Best of TED 