wombat_socho

well, if we follow the University libary analogy, which begins to break down fairly quickly, it's not "me" or "you" who is forcing anything, the very nature of the University forces them to spend money and space, and, idealistically, it never stops. And in reality, it often doesn't. Schools are continually expanding existing libraries and building new ones. Square footage of library space is a fairly important aspect of determining prestige among Universities.

At the same time, there are a lot of crap books and not all books should be included. So that would help save resources.

But, again following this analogy, what if the library in question decided to not allow any of the books of a certain genre to be in it, simply because the books are of that genre? No murder mysteries because, well, pick any "rational" explanation. They're all equally invalid.

For example, I think Intelligent Design is, well, it's actually rather funny is what it is, but I would never want a library to exclude well-written books on the positive side of ID, simply because they are about ID. Let folks read them and let them make up their own minds.

In the case of Oprah's show, she has "infinite" floorspace. The shows are going to be done, so there's not really any cost factor in deciding what the subject matter (guests) will be. One could say, "Well, it's her show, she should be able to decide who the guests should be." One could also say, "Oprah has reached a certain status where a kind of journalistic responsibility should be part of this decision, and this doesn't seem like a very responsible journalistic decision, it feels like censorship."

If the articles you linked to stated merely, "it's her decision, end of story", that would be one thing. But they go on and on and on with all of these "reasons" why Oprah shouldn't have Cube or "his ilk" on her show, and, IMO, they are all simply rationalizations for censorship clouded in words that are meant to sound impressive.