excerpts from the book
What Orwell Didn't Know
Propaganda and the New Face of
American Politics
Edited by Andras Szanto
PublicAffairs, 2007, paperback
pxvii
Orville Schell about George Orwell and his essay "Politics
and the English Language"
George Orwell examined how, by controlling
language and discourse, and through the relentless repetition
of half-truths and lies, official propaganda could sway and control
the thinking of ordinary people.
pxviii
Orville Schell about George Orwell and his essay "Politics
and the English Language"
A man may take a drink because he feels
himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely
because he drinks. It is the same thing that is happening with
the English language. If one gets rid of these habits one can
think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first
step towards political regeneration... Above all what is needed
is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.'
pxxi
Paul Mazur, the partner of Edward Bernays, the father of public
relations and propaganda
We must shape a new mentality. Man's desires
must overshadow his needs.
pxxx
George Orwell in "Why I Write"
Every line of serious work I have written
since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism
and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
pxxx
George Washington
If men are to be precluded from offering
their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious
and alarming consequences that can. invite the consideration of
mankind, 'wrote the first president, reason is of no use for us;
the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we
may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
p11
George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language"
Political language is designed to make
lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance
of solidity to pure wind.
p12
Nichalas Lemann, "The Limits of Language"
Propaganda is often quite beautifully
and clearly written. When it works, it works by virtue of being
simple and memorable. What is dangerous about propaganda is that
it is misleading,
p12
President George W. Bush to a joint session of Congress, September
20, 2001, unveiling the "War on Terror"
On September the 11th, enemies of freedom
committed an act of war against our country. Americans have known
wars - but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign
soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the
casualties of war - but not at the center of a great city on a
peaceful morning. Americans have known surprise attacks - but
never before on thousands of civilians. All of this was brought
upon us in a single day - and night fell on a different world,
a world where freedom itself is under attack.
p21
George Orwell in essay "The Prevention of Literature (1946),
The Orwell Reader
From the totalitarian point of view history
is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian
state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order
to keep its position, has to be thought ( of as infallible. But
since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary
to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake
was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually
happened.
p23
Ron Suskind, New York Times, October 17, 2004, recounting a comment
by Karl Rove
We're an empire now, and when we act,
we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality
- judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will
sort f out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will
be left to just study what we do.
p48
Mark Danner
[George] Orwell feared Communism, Fascism,
Totalitarianism... What he did not foresee was a privatized but
global corporate oligarchy whose police power comes wrapped in
a sheepish ideology of laissez-faire, sanctified as God's will.
p60
George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language"
In the case of a word like democracy,
not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make
one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt
that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently
the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is
a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word
if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are
often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person
who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer
to think he means something quite different.
p61
George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language"
In our time, political speech and writing
are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance
of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations,
the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended,
but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to
face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political
parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism,
question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages
are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the
countryside ... this is called pacification .... People are imprisoned
for years without trial ... this is called elimination of unreliable
elements...
p63
George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language"
This invasion of one's mind by ready-made
phrases... can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard
against them, and every such phrase anaesthetises a portion of
one's brain.
Political language-and with variations
this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists-is
designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and
to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One-cannot change
this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits...
p68
George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language"
If people are told the truth, they will
reason to the right conclusions-unless they are stupid or ignorant.
And ignorance can be cured by truths conveyed in good prose.
p68
George Lakoff
Reason is inherently emotional. You can't
even choose a goal, much less form a plan and carry it out, without
a sense that it will satisfy you, not disgust you. Fear and anxiety
will affect your plans and your actions. You act differently,
and plan differently, out of hope and joy than out of fear and
anxiety.
p70
George Lakoff
Conservative "freedom" is utterly
different than progressive "freedom".
p71
George Lakoff
Today, sophisticated right-wing propaganda
is very well written.
p73
George Lakoff
Conservative think tanks, over thirty-five
years, started with the conservative worldview and showed how
to apply it everywhere on every issue, and even beyond issues
in the acts of governance - cutting regulating budgets, reassigning
regulators, using the courts to redefine the laws, changing the
facts on Web sites, eliminating libraries. New Democratic think
tanks haven't helped much. The problem is that they are policy
think tanks. They mistakenly think that "rational" programs
and policies constitute political ideas. They don't understand
unconscious thought. It's the unspoken ideas behind the programs
and the policies - the worldview, deep frames, metaphors, and
cultural narratives - that need to be changed in the public mind.
p77
Drew Westen
In a closed society, one party or despot
has control over the instruments of mass communication and the
power to enforce its will. Something very similar, however, can
happen in a democratic society under specific conditions that
are recognizable only in hindsight, although Orwell recognized]
one of the most important, namely, when a government wages a "perpetual
war" that keeps people terrified, focused in their hatred
against external and internal enemies, and "patriotic"
in the Orwellian sense.
p137
Welcome to the Infotainment Freak Show
Martin Kaplan
In the year 1984, reflecting on the book
1984, sociologist Neil Postman gave a series of lectures at the
University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication
in which he raised the question: Were Americans doomed to inhabit
George Orwell's authoritarian dystopia? His answer: No. We were
veering instead toward the hedonic world depicted in Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World and were in imminent danger of amusing ourselves
to death.
The pathology Postman diagnosed derived
from what he termed the epistemology of entertainment, which was
on the verge of displacing the epistemology of the Enlightenment.
Entertainment substitutes juxtaposition for order, storytelling
for truth telling, graphics for texts, sensation for reason, spectacle
for seriousness, combat for discourse, play for purpose, sizzle
for steak. "Our priests and presidents," he wrote, "our
surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry
less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the
demands of good showmanship. Had Irving Berlin changed one word
in the title of his celebrated song, he would have been as prophetic,
albeit more terse, as Aldous Huxley. He need only have written,
There's No Business But Show Business."
Today, the clock strikes thirteen every
hour in America. .That startling digit is not evidence that Big
Brother rules, but rather that entertainment reigns. In contemporary
America, and arguably in most industrial democracies, the imperative
of practically every domain of human existence is to grab and
hold the attention of audiences. In politics, it is now more important
for a candidate to have big name recognition, and the money to
buy big media, than it is to have big ideas. In news, it is absolutely
essential to have high ratings, but it is only optional to have
high accuracy. These days, a university can get by with average
scholarship, but without a strong brand identity n the educational
marketplace, it will surely perish. A museum at fails to mount
blockbuster traveling shows, complete with a killer gift shop,
is on a fast track to losing revenues, patrons, and public subsidies.
To attract tourists, cities now turn to starchitects, whose glitzy
creations rival Hollywood and Babel. Commerce, once about goods
and services, is today about experiences and aspirations; every
store promises a little bit of Disneyland. Even our interior lives
are played out through the tropes of entertainment. It is now
normal to experience clothing as wardrobe, furniture as set decoration,
other people as characters, conversation as dialogue, and events
as plot points in the narratives of our life stories, which come
complete with voice-overs and flashbacks.
Postman's jeremiad clearly failed to stem
entertainment's tide, just as Orwell's fables failed to vanquish
Totalitarianism. Our present moment in the history of consciousness
is widely known as postmodernity - "pomo," in a fun
shorthand fitting for the age of show business. In the first part
of the twentieth century, Karl Popper said that philosophy's task
was to demarcate between what is scientific and what is not, and
he linked the project of science to the robustness of open societies.
But by the twilight of that century, porno intellectuals were
declaring the Popperian project dead, and their doppelgangers
in popular culture have since been dancing on its grave. By now
we all know the postmodern mantra: Objective knowledge is a mirage.
There is no such thing as epistemology without a knowing subject.
Science is no longer a privileged realm, designed to weigh the
truth of competing claims, but is yet another act in the porno
circus, where knowledge based on rigorous trial and error is on
the same footing as all other tribal belief systems. All reality
is socially constructed. Everything, even truth, is politics.
Politics, once conceived as the craft of decisionmaking, has been
remade as the art of attention getting. Communication, rather
than striving to convey truth and meaning, now prizes informing
an audience less than having an audience. The public interest
has been redefined as what the public is interested in; the public
sphere has become a theater, where citizenship is a performance.
Orwell famously worried about the divorce
of public discourse, including journalism, from truth, but he
did not anticipate its remarriage to entertainment. Journalism,
whose practitioners in high-end newspapers and early broadcast
outlets once saw their task as recording the truth, now largely
functions to hold up a mirror for us to see our fun-house reflection.
The old journalistic paradigm posited a search for accuracy, objectivity,
and fairness. The new porno paradigm declares those goals misbegotten;
they are inherently unachievable. because everyone possesses and
advocates for his or her own truth, the job of the reporter is
not to adjudicate among competing assertions, but to assemble
them into a de facto collage. The fairness of contemporary journalism
resembles not the fairness of a judge and jury weighing evidence
within a framework of rules, but rather the fairground of the
carnival midway, where barkers out on behalf of their wares.
Whereas accuracy can never be achieved,
"balance"-the new lowest common denominator and deceptive
battle cry - is an easy goal; all you need to do is open up your
airwaves and column inches to everyone. Better yet, open the public
square to combatants, in polarized pairs. There's no surer way
to attract an audience than a bear fight, and no dispute is too
nuanced not to be reducible by modern journalism to he-says versus
she-says. Instead of trying to tell us what's true, journalism
now prides itself on finding two sides to every story, no matter
how feeble one side may be. There's no grand narrative making
sense the progression of current events; there are just dueling
narratives, competing story lines, alternate and equally plausible
ways to connect the dots. It's as though a generation of journalists
has been weaned on Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, and their
only recourse in the Dada zoo is pastiche.
In such a carnivalesque media ecology,
people are patsies for propagandists. Even if a near majority
of authorities holds one view about reality (on the causes of
global warming, say, or the validity of evolution, the risks of
mercury pollution, the existence of WMD in Iraq, the success of
abstinence-only as a sex education strategy), a television "news"
booker is always delighted to invite a fringe spokesperson onto
a program as "balance," to convey the notion that these
are all wide-open questions. Journalists have recused themselves
from ranking the legitimacy of "experts," so corporate
and political front groups with lofty names (Discovery Institute,
Heritage Foundation, National Center for Policy Analysis, National
Association of Scholars, et al. have the same opportunity to inject
themselves into public debate as research institutions that still
cling to old-fashioned standards of evidence and accuracy. These
"think tanks" manufacture debate. That's what they do:
Their aim is to create the illusion of controversy, even when
the facts are indisputable, because they know how enslaved contemporary
journalism is by the tyranny of false equivalence. What's more,
the louder you are, the more outrageous your claim, the less civil
your discourse, the farther you stand from common ground, the
more welcome you will be as a guest and a source. It is not necessary
to be right; to make the sale, it is only necessary to get attention.
The old paradigm depended on a hierarchy
of gatekeepers. Within journalistic institutions, reporters were
vetted by editors, copy editors, and executives; judgments were
tempered by the time span of the daily news cycle. Among journalistic
outlets, print publications set the gold standard, and national
newspapers set the standard among them. But now, the brand names
of old-guard institutions mean little to mass audiences. The Internet
has made everyone a reporter, videographer, and distributor of
content. This may well be a good thing in itself, but the Internet
is also putting out to pasture the professionals who presided
over the accumulation, fairness, and accuracy of the news.
The need to hold audiences round the clock
has put a premium not on the information journalists see as important
for citizens to know, but instead on the "content" that
corporate owners bet will mesmerize consumers. The turning point
probably came in the mid-1980s, when CBS News discovered that
60 Minutes could be a reliable cash cow. Today, nearly universally,
news is programmed not as a public service but as a profit center.
Its messages are designed to appeal to humans' hardwiring. In
Johan Huizinga's formulation, we are not Homo sapiens, the creature
who knows; we are Homo ludens, the creature who plays. Like it
or not, our species is a sucker for novelty; sex, fear, pictures,
motion, noise, scatology; fin; we can't stop our eyes from turning
toward celebrity and spectacle. Journalism's job today is not
to find and deliver us the worthwhile hidden in the muck, but
rather to stream the muck at us, 24/7, and to sell our captive
eyeballs to advertisers.
When Ted Turner launched CNN in 1980,
there were high hopes for the broad diffusion of news. The results
of the twenty-five-year experiment in round-the-clock cable "news,"
which now includes Fox and MSNBC, are now in. Here's what cable
news is really good at: trapped miners, Michael Jackson, runaway
brides, missing blondes, Christmas Eve murders, Princess Di, Paris
Hilton, hurricanes, tsunamis, disinformation, whiz-bang graphics,
scary theme music, polls, gotcha, HeadOn ads, "Thanks for
having me," people who begin every answer to antagonistic
questions with "Look," people who say, "I didn't
interrupt you when you were talking," and anchors who say,
"We'll have to leave it there." Here's what cable news
is not so good at insight, context, depth, reflection, proportion,
perspective, relevance, humility, information, analysis, news.
There is nothing that pomo news likes
more than Armageddon. When the Hezbollah kidnapping of Israeli
soldiers in 2006 escalated into a war between Israel and Lebanon,
it was covered as a tinderbox about to explode, a downward-spiraling
crisis, the tipping point of a regional conflagration, the start
of World War III. We were told it could trigger an oil crisis
worse than the one in the late 1970s, resulting in gas lines and
rationing and $20-per-gallon at the pump. It could spark worldwide
inflation, recession, depression. It was the most dangerous moment
since (fill in the blank). To be sure, it was a dangerous situation.
But much of what the news media delivered was in fact crisis porn,
fed to an insatiable audience, and itself a likely cause of the
escalation of the crisis.
Journalism, especially television journalism,
has tremendous ability to control the tone of what it covers.
The quantity, the music, the graphics, the word choices can all
be dialed up or down. The notion that professional news judgment-a
reliable journalistic rule book - is what really drives the nature
and kind of coverage is hopelessly quaint. The truth is that a
missing white woman can easily be turned by the media machine
into a global red-alert, and a holocaust in Africa can be marginalized
as a sidebar story. When it comes to holding audiences' attention,
the only thing better than suspense is suspense about carnage,
and the only thing better than suspense about carnage is suspense
about the apocalypse. Terrorists, especially stateless terrorists,
depend on the media's addiction to fear and crisis. They have
gamed the media system; they bank on getting their message amplified.
This is not to diminish the legitimate news value of the horrors
they perpetrate. But it's also true that attempts to cool things
off, reduce tensions, and back off from the brink are at odds
with the sexy Nielsens that accompany realtime coverage of the
end of the world. It is chilling that the arbiter we used to rely
on for the facts is itself now a stakeholder with a vested interest
in imagining the worst.
The firing, in the spring of 2007, of
radio host Don Imus was depicted as a victory for civil discourse.
In reality, the most important thing to know about Don Imus is
that he was a financial gusher for Viacom and General Electric
until his advertisers began peeling away. The only reason that
shock jocks are on the air in the first place is that people pay
attention to them. We lend our ears to Imus and his ilk because
outrageousness amuses us. A merely curmudgeonly cowboy would not
have pulled big numbers, and neither the political class nor the
punditocracy would have returned his bookers' calls. What made
the powerful kiss Imus's ring, and what made people tune in, was
how bad-boy - how rude, disrespectful, licking-the-razor - he
was. Clearly, large audiences liked to gasp at what he got away
with, and CBS and NBC were champs at spinning those oh-my-Gods
into ka-chings.
The same could still be said of the envelope-pushing
by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Michael
Savage, and the dozens of other acts in the infotainment freak
show. Their effect may be to debase discourse, inflame prejudice,
sow ignorance, exculpate criminality, incite rancor, ruin reputations,
and stoke the right-wing base-but their effect is not their job.
Their job is to make money-for the-media conglomerates that employ
them. We may revile them for being demagogues, but we are chumps
if we ignore how relentlessly the companies that employ them monetize
their noxious shtick. Those corporations are not in the news business,
nor the public interest business, nor the patriotism business.
They're in the profit business.
l Imagine if the audience's appetite for
outrage extended to the atrophy of American democracy. Imagine
if media bosses believed that we were insatiable for information
about the apparent attempt to rig the 2008 election by politicizing
the Justice Department and prosecuting phony voter fraud. Imagine
if the same kind of blanket coverage that's currently conferred
on loopy astronauts, bratty rehaboholics, and slandered basketball
teams were afforded instead to the assault on civil liberties
and democratic processes now underway in America. Would we watch
it the same Pavlovian way we watch tits, twits, and tornadoes?
Media executives think not. They don't
believe the jury is still out on that one. They don't think that
we're addicted to junk news and shock jocks because it's the only
diet they've offered us; they think the market for civically useful
information is simply saturated. And they don't think that way
because they're just tools of the vast right-wing conspiracy (though
some, like Fox, have made that their market niche) or because
it serves their economic self-interest (though the tax cuts and
wealth transfers whose consequences they've declined to cover
have benefited them handsomely). No, they air what they air, and
cover what they cover, as a capitalist service to us. Us, in the
form of our mutual funds, our pension funds, our IRAs and 401(k)s,
our collective American existence as Wall Street. Entertainment
is exquisitely sensitive to demand. As long as we demand quarterly
growth in profits more aggressively than we demand real news,
the clowns will always get more airtime than the fifth column
of hacks who have penetrated the halls of Justice.
Surely this knack for pandering to our
taste for sensationalism is not why the news business is the only
for-profit enterprise to be protected by the Constitution. Nor
is it likely that the modern journalistic project, defined as
the imperative to obtain market share, will do its part to deliver
the educated citizenry that Thomas Jefferson said democracy depends
on. Perhaps the Internet, by exponentially increasing the number
of channels through which we can receive news, and by enabling
new knowledge-networks that can be mobilized for information gathering,
will prove to be a powerful antidote to the brave new world of
entertainment über al/es. But it is just as possible that
the need to monetize cyberspace will have the same consequences
for online information that it has had in the old media. On the
Internet, no one knows if you're Big Brother.
p148
In the United States, concentrated media ... Big Media, may have
replaced Big Brother as the principal danger to the open public
dialogue that makes democracy possible.
... The fifty men and women who dominate
[the major media] corporations would fit in a large room. They
constitute a new Ministry of lnformation and Culture.
p149
Bill Moyers
Big media is ravenous. It never gets enough,
always wants more. And it will stop at nothing to get it. These
conglomerates are an empire. And they are imperial.
p149
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner Michael J.
Copps, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times
[U]nder pressure from media conglomerates
previous commissions have eviscerated the [broadcast license]
renewal process. Now we get what big broadcasters lovingly call
'postcard renewal' - the agency typically rubber-stamps an application
without any substantive review.
George
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