Bradbury now insists that Fahrenheit 451 had nothing to do with censorship or McCarthyism, but he used to say just the opposite. In 1956 he said: "I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. [...] I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action."
And in 1979: "Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel, which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony."
It's been years since I read it, but I always got the feeling that the world was generally dystopian. Take the TV aspect of it - it's not just that people watch TV instead of reading, but that their attention spans are so shot that TV has become extremely vapid, violent, and rapid fire. The main characters wife runs over dogs for fun, and she almost kills herself taking sleeping pills because she couldn't pay attention to how many she took. The firehouse dog isn't a lovable dalmatian, but a cold and deadly eight legged robot.
If the book is based on a grotesque exaggeration of trends he was seeing in post-war America, then it could well be about censorship, TV, pills, paving over natural beauty, alienation from society, etc. Perhaps Bradbury has just emphasized different aspects at different times.
And in 1979: "Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel, which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony."
Really not sure what to make of that.