In reading a column and then a letter by George Orwell (aka, Eric Blair), it was observed in the column that journalists that work for a government learn either to write propaganda or leave. I found his words and thoughts on these topics pertinent to our day and this newsletter.
My question for today’s conversation: How do you find the truth about something considered newsworthy by our news media? How do you check their claims? Do you?
His words were,
A writer inevitably writes… about contemporary events, and his impulse is to tell what he believes to be the truth. But no government, no big organisation, will pay for the truth.
Writing this in the heat of a world war in 1944, he finished off with a theme of his life: “in our going forward into a collectivist age without remembering that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” Free press makes truth-telling possible and more likely, but only if the writers will pursue truth, and only if their bosses will permit them.
And who will hold the politicians and power-brokers to account if not the journalists and today’s social media? No one. (I include the millions of who engage in truth-telling on social media and internet sites in a very lax use of the term “journalist.”)
To be a journalist today gives one two options: propaganda/advocacy or truth-telling (as much as possible). The powers today are one political party or the other, and on each side of the ledger is lots of money at stake.
I take one example and then another. FoxNews represents the first, and its prime time talking heads tell just enough truth to be considered news media and enough advocacy to destroy truth-telling. They are sycophants, even flying monkeys, for Donald Trump. When he goes down – who knows when – will they go down with him? No, as they’ll just glue themselves to another politician. Their polluted screeds contaminate public discourse, uneducate their listeners, and corrode the journalist’s ethic. Their routine claims to Christian faith sour the public into stereotyping Christians into unthinking political grabbers.
Nipping at the heels of the above opinion is the news that Chris Cuomo will host a show on NewsNation, starting this fall. A briefer comment. Cuomo disgraced CNN, himself, his family, and journalism … one has to wonder if his second news life will be any different. A life of advocacy corrupts the pursuit of truth.
There is in our day too much fear-driven, or money-based speculation about what will happen if we don’t do what the news media think must be done. Many shift into apocalyptic mode to grab the reader by the scruff of the neck and force them to listen – a kind of “America’s doomed if we don’t do this or that.” American historians know politicians have themselves always talked like this – my platform or we are doomed. Our journalists often comply with the politicians, and before long people are sucked in.
Orwell said this well too: “People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.” A kind of confirmation bias, I suppose, is at work.
How do we get to the bottom of the muck to find out what actually happened? Or to studies that have sufficient evidence to point us in the right direction when it comes to our wishes and hopes? We need a full jug of wake-up medicine because our biases are at work. Orwell made this important observation too: “… it is impossible to discover what is happening outside one’s own immediate circle.” We speak today of silos, as if our Twitter feed is the fullness of what is happening.
Orwell, dressed up in a language as he was in the style before last, thought we could become more objective in our approach.
All these mental vices spring ultimately from the nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the produce of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization. But at any rate it is not surprising that in our age the followers of Marx [a big issue for the intelligentsia of England in his days] have not been much more successful as prophets than the followers of Nostradamus.
#boom to rightists and leftists today.
What we need is some old-fashioned honesty, the kind Orwell himself blandished in a winter 1945 letter to Partisan Review, in which he owned up – this as a journalist – to his mistakes in reporting about the war. His theory, he admitted, got him off the tracks of where the evidence actually led. He at least said so.
Perhaps we all need to back up more than a few decades to Milton and read his Areopagitica on the importance of a free press. In churches people vote with their butts and their bills. With the press today we vote with clicks.
It takes work to discover something close to the truth about what is deemed newsworthy. Not all of it is.
Complex topic, this. There is so much money in main stream media & it dissuades and blocks truth on some crucial topics or slices of truth - on left, right and even center. (Center propaganda sounds less outrage and more like persuasion to inaction).
Top layer of screening for truth: if a hostile foreign government’s state run media (e.g. RT aka Russia Today or other) has talking poijnts showing up on American news outlets (Fox oftentimes), it’s Anti American propaganda. Anti democracy.
Another layer: if media stirs up outrage, if the “news” host has outrage energy in words or tone, it’s propaganda to keep us in our amygdala. This is everywhere.
The layers continue.
Good news: the Poles who lived through WWII became very well versed in soviet propaganda and could spot it right away - and ignore it. Interesting that in the last 10 yrs, those Poles still alive could see, in the last 10 yrs of uptick, Russian propaganda for what it was. We Americans can learn this, too.
Unmasking Maskirovka by Bagge is a good source for more info
Steven Hassan’s work on brainwashing & cults helps point out brainwashing techniques and how to counter them. The yelling tirades of Alex Jones, for example, are a tool for brain washing. Algorithms funnel people into deeper and deeper techniques to deepen confirmation bias and worse. It’s military grade mind stuff. Hassan is great in providing balanced approach to our loved ones who have gotten caught up in propaganda. He talks about how to approach or not approach those who are in the subset of individuals who may be able to get free of the lies, manipulation, & control.
It does take work to seek out truth. It takes humility as well.