Creative censorship.

There are times when censorship regulations can actually lead to a greater creativity. The Hays Code restrictions of Golden Age Hollywood led to a cinematic subtext of trains going into tunnels, panning away to lighthouses & every cigarette being presumably post-coital. Instead of lamenting the loss of illicit imagery, audiences loved this doubly entendric language. And in many ways, it cemented cinema culture as a distinct beast from the movie industry that had spawned it. Finally, alongside the gossip magazines & the glitzy premiere newsreels, the audience at large could now collectively participate in the culture of cinema while the film was actually playing. Indeed, the language was their own -written for the audience & circumventing censors- and it was infinitely more fun than anything that could ever be explicitly shown. Of course, Stephen Colbert sums up this phenomenon far more eloquently than I can, in this excerpt from the 'Hollywood' chapter in his I AM AMERICA & SO CAN YOU

Death of Batgirl: I've slowed down the collision to show how less is more
& to see just how harrowing  3 frames can be.
All censorship info from Kevin Smith's awesome Fatman on Batman podcasts

In BATMAN: The Animated Series, there's an episode ('OVER THE EDGE') where Batgirl imagines the ramifications of her own death, as Commissioner Gordon blames Batman for his daughter's demise. Batgirl is thrown from a skyscraper, landing on the bonnet of her father's police car. As you might expect for an after-school cartoon, Standards & Practices disallowed the scene. The writers simply resubmitted with the moment of impact witnessed from inside the car, and it was allowed to air.

Of course, for those invested in the story, this alternative is ever more horrifying because we see the impact through her father's eyes. But ultimately, it is not the invested viewer that broadcast censors are concerned with, but the channel-surfing child who may stumble across a random moment of violence without any context to process it. It is a similar story in the early episode BE A CLOWN, wherein Joker impersonates a party clown to kidnap the Mayor's son. Standards & Practices found the kidnapping plot a bit intense for the kids, but allowed it if there was no dreaded 'second location' & the child went no further than the Joker's van parked out the front of the house party. Again, the division is there to protect the child who may stumble across the show without knowing the full story, and have no concept of how sinister the kidnapping plot may be. But how might this standard of censorship change as we move increasingly into an On Demand broadcasting system?

 An example from the comic world, on the HISTORY CHANNEL's Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked