National Coalition for Censorship

The Coalition against Censorship (NCAC, see ncac.org) sees itself as “a first responder to protect” the right to free expression. On their web page “What We Do”, they state:

“We promote freedom of thought and inquiry and oppose censorship. When controversy occurs, we encourage and facilitate dialogue between divergent voices and perspectives, including those that have historically been silenced.”

Sounds like they are my kind of guys. Sponsors of this organization are large media outlets, such as Hachette, Harper Collins, MacMillan, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, The New York Times plus – and there’s the rub – Ingram Content Group. I get to that in a minute.

NCAC had their annual gala “Celebrating Free Speech and its Defenders” on November 2 in a Manhattan venue, where they bestowed four prizes on groups and/or individuals for their fight against, or suffering from, censorship (see the image below). A ticket to this event cost a whooping $1,000. Our Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust agreed to foot the bill. So I bought a ticket. When I did so, their ticket counter was sitting at 14.

When browsing their website afterwards, I found that they have an online form where anyone can report censorship. I decided spontaneously to submit the case as described in my book The Day Amazon Murdered Free Speech, which also exists as a documentary of the same title. Among other things, this documentary demonstrates how Ingram Content Group, which has a monopoly in book distribution in the US, uses its total control of the book market to deny access to that entire book market for certain publishing outlets or for books they or their customers don’t like.

Recall what I wrote above: Ingram Content Group is one of the main sponsors of the NCAC. So guess what happened?

A day later, I received this email from a certain Alex Finan (alex@ncac.org):

“Dear Mr. Rudolf,

You purchased a ticket yesterday for our event, A Celebration of Free Speech and Its Defenders, on November 2nd. We apologize for the error, but the event is sold out and we inadvertently failed to turn off ticket processing. As a result, we are unable to accommodate you tomorrow. We regret the error, and have processed a refund for your ticket purchase. Thank you for thinking of supporting the National Coalition Against Censorship; we truly regret the error.

Sincerely,
NCAC”

Sure. Such events have only a very limited number of tickets. The counter sat at 14 when I purchased mine, so it was not even close to sold out.

Well, next year I’ll try again, the day they start selling tickets. Let’s see what excuse they can come up with then.

When those pretending to fight against censorship – Ingram Content Group and the National Coalition against Censorship – are the root cause why censorship and silencing prevail, we as a society have a real problem.