One of the persons I follow on twitter recently linked this article. It contains the following claims:
[Ray Bradbury] has always insisted that the main theme of the book is the role of the mass media and its effect on the populace
virtually nobody accepts this as the true theme of the novel, even though it’s an exact-ish quote from the guy who wrote the bloody thing.
The perfect example of this was a time when Bradbury himself was giving a lecture on the novel to a class of college students and upon casually mentioning that the theme of the novel was the dangers of television, he was stopped in his tracks by someone loudly exclaiming “no, it’s about censorship!“ [...] Bradbury was so pissed off at the sheer pig-headedness of the students that he straight up stormed out of the class and vowed he’d never give another lecture on it.
All these claims are unsourced in the article and I doubt than any of these are real (for example in the last claim no specific school is mentioned, raising a pretty big red flag).
My question is then: did Ray Bradbury ever claim that his book [Fahrenheit 451] was not about censorship?
As additional bonus questions, if he did:
is it true that virtually nobody accepts it?
did he ever walked out of a lecture on the novel because students were contradicting him?