What Would Orwell Say?
1984 was prescient
Everyone who attended school has read Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s dystopian novel about a world under repressive authoritarian rule.
In Orwell’s world, the government used technology to manufacture an endless stream of lies, essentially brainwashing the population into both belief and submission.
Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, works for the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to review, refine and rewrite history so that it conforms to government-dictated propaganda. As Orwell wrote so presciently, “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.”
What Orwell feared and what he was warning us about was what we might today call Mediated Media. Winston Smith’s job, in fact, was to ‘mediate’ the press — to clean up earlier versions of newspaper stories.
Russia today is a classic example of Mediated Media. Putin has been brilliant in controlling the Russian media in all forms. He controls all the newspapers and TV stations, and they pump out the propaganda which effectively re-writes history to his liking and one that conforms to his view of the world. Ukraine is run by Nazi thugs and must be liberated and cleansed. The West is behind the fascist Neo-Nazi government in Kyiv. Ukraine has always been a part of Russia and will always be a part of Russia. The vast majority of Russians get their news and information from television and the vast majority fervently believe this rewritten history.
You can see the same kind of Mediated Media in Belarus, North Korea, China, and in Hungary (sorry to say).
But of course, the media goes far beyond television and newspapers. It also encompasses online. But here too, the Russians and the Chinese have been quite effective in Mediating online content as well. Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram, among many others, are now blocked in Russia, as they are in China. This is to ‘protect’ the population from ‘lies and propaganda.’ It is for their own good.
Just to make sure, anyone spreading ‘lies’ about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is liable to receive a 15-year jail sentence. In China, you only get seven years — how progressive.
Orwell was warning us about the dangers of a “Mediated” press.
There is considerable pressure in the West also to ‘Mediate’ the press, though, of course, nowhere near the draconian laws and actions that have been passed in Russia, China, and others, but they are rising fast. Here too, they are viewed as protecting the citizenry for their own good.
A Mediated Press is great so long as you are the one mediating, and the mediator’s beliefs and yours align. The problem comes that once you allow mediation, you have opened the door to someone else coming in, kicking you out, and mediating it their way, which might not be your way.
That’s why we like a free press.
A free press is messy. It is supposed to be. It allows all points of view.
As Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote: “The best remedy for bad free speech is more free speech.”
The Framers of the US Constitution understood that free speech was the very foundation of democracy. That is why the very first Amendment to the Constitution reads Congress Shall Make No Law Abridging Freedom of Speech or of the Press. No law means no law.
At UnPress, we are dedicated to a truly Free Press. The whole idea is to open the door to everyone — to completely re-define what news is, what it looks like, and most importantly, who gets to make it.
If you’re interested in learning more, please get in touch with us here on our website