Recent studies on media censorship in colonial Korea have converged on the newly discovered Choson Publication Monthly Police Report, published from 1928 to 1938 by the colonial government’s censorship bureau. These new studies do not explicitly problematize the issue of whether the Monthly Report is an accurate and comprehensive record of censorship activity or not. However, the record’s official stature does not necessarily guarantee accurate representation of the actual practice of censorship in that period. We found that the numbers of seized or erased articles recorded in the Monthly Report do not correspond with the numbers of articles actually expunged from newspaper pages. This study begins by problematizing the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the Monthly Report censorship records. In addition, it undertakes a comparative analysis of the Monthly Report and contemporary newspapers, employing both record-centric and page-centric approaches. This research also examines how the presence of censorship traces served as tangible evidence of colonial power.