Current day comparison to Orwell’s 1984 – Part 2

Written by Mr Law, Health and Technology on November 10, 2023. Posted in Current News

In his book Homage to Catalonia (Orwell, 1938), Orwell recounts first-hand how the mainstream media in Spain became an instrument of political censorship and propaganda during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War

He describes how the Spanish press were publishing information at odds with the reality of his own observations, and concluded that both sides of the political spectrum were capable of using the mainstream media to manipulate truth and mislead the public.

What disturbed Orwell was that what he was witnessing wasn’t just censorship where information is removed or redacted.

The truth of events was being created and replaced for political reasons so that the general public were being misled, and the replacement was only noticeable by those like Orwell who had directly observed the reported event.

Six years later when writing Nineteen-Eighty Four, Orwell drew on this real-world experience when describing how his fictional totalitarian government’s Ministry of Truth (MiniTrue) were rewriting the content of newspapers and historical texts to suit the goals of current day political agendas.

MiniTrue control every source of information in order to maintain control over both history and people, and shape the narrative. Orwell’s government’s philosophy is that controlling the narrative in the present enables control of the past, and control of the past allows them to justify all actions taken in the future1.

A key reason for the manipulation of language and meaning discussed already is that it distorts events and concepts by calling them something else, and in doing so creates a completely different inner picture of them for the reader.

For example, consider the image created in your mind when you read the September 12, 2018 headline from the Rotherham Record newspaper shown below that was published at the height of the Telford child sexual exploitation scandal.

During this period, and even though police, social workers, teachers, youth workers and the mainstream media knew the offenders grooming and committing sexual crimes against young girls were a small group of men all of the same middle eastern ethnicity; fear of being called racist for rightly arresting and prosecuting the men overshadowed protecting vulnerable young white schoolgirls (Johnson, 2022).

By saying that one particular girl ‘slept with’ over 100 men before the age of 16, the mainstream media gave the impression that the girl had the ability to consent2, and completely avoided acknowledging these acts for what they were – the commission of carnal knowledge3 and rape of an underage girl, some of whom were as young as 12 years of age.

With these carefully worded headlines the mainstream media blamed the underage white victim for the harm visited upon her by middle-aged brown men, and promulgated the narrative that police and key agencies4 had been using to avoid prosecuting the perpetrators for many years; that these events should be viewed as consensual acts of ‘child prostitution’, rather than the far more politically damaging truth that for fear of being labelled racist every responsible authority had turned the other way to avoid seeing the child exploitation that was occurring right in front of them.

As professional organisations were created and set about the task of codifying journalistic ethics in the early 20^th century, impartiality and accuracy in reporting began to matter (Fabry, 2017).

For this reason, well before the separate job title of fact checker existed, credible mainstream editors and reporters sought to ensure the imputations made in the media were accurate and supported by evidence (Fabry, 2017).

However, it is now clear that this historic appeal to objective professionalism is a far cry from the disingenuous paid-for5 propaganda6 we have seen during the most recent political campaigns and elections inter alia America, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada; and since the start of the global Covid-19 response.

In return for significant ‘donations’, fact checker organisations have promulgated ideological narratives, censored dissenting voices and defended from legitimate criticism those with the resources to pay for it (Parker, 2020).

The mainstream media has become obsessed with claiming anything up to and even including rigorous scientific analysis whose results oppose the opinions or political narratives those funding fact checkers is misinformation.

The operation of fact checking today is no different to Orwell’s MiniTrue working 24/7 to ensure retroactively continuity after The Party arbitrarily changed which of the other nation states they were and had been engaged in permanent war with.

Analysists and researchers have shown that many fact checks misrepresent, lie, or even disingenuously reference other fact checks as their primary evidentiary source material7.

Further, it is difficult to take fact checkers seriously when there are even examples of fact checker organisations fact checking other fact checker organisations and claiming those organisation’s fact checks to be disinformation (Romero, 2022).

While defending a potential six- or seven-figure civil defamation judgement8, a fact checker organisation admitted that fact checks and the resulting labels they use to proclaim content as ‘altered’, ‘missing context’, ‘partly false’ or ‘false’ were not themselves factual representations – but rather a statement of opinion (Stossel, 2021).

Even the editors of top-tier medical journals are asking whether the commercial interests funding some fact checker organisations are the reason they are misleading and trying to control how people think under the guise of fact checking9.

Finally, we have seen when anyone referring to the Covid-19 mRNA injections as ‘experimental gene therapies’ was de-platformed and became the target of polemic and ad-hominem attacks. Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers and the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT)10 have all at some point used the term gene therapy to describe the Covid-19 mRNA injections.

Even while the FDA sought to quietly carve out an exception for the Covid-19 injections from their own rules on gene therapy products, documentation and slides from meetings held within the FDA showed that their own experts and staff considered them to be gene therapies, and that the FDA were purposely not acknowledging their gene therapy nature in a vain attempt to increase public confidence in and acceptance of these novel technologies11.

Information recently placed before a Senate inquiry in Australia has also seen the Australian Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) admit that the mRNA injections did meet the definition of a gene therapy, which meant that under Australia’s Gene Technology Act12 they should have required an application to and regulation by the OGTR prior to manufacture13.

At the same time it appears journalists employed by mainstream media organisations as fact checkers were either blinkered to all this information, or perhaps considered themselves the public face of the FDA’s propaganda efforts.

Fact checkers have been the primary proponents of the not a gene therapy response. Their fact checks almost always open with a social media post that correctly states that mRNA injections are gene therapies.

The fact checkers then disparage or humiliate the person posting this statement and use self-referential and circular reasoning to deny the gene therapy status while promulgating that the reason mRNA therapies are set apart from gene therapies is because they don’t change a person’s genes14.

Political and private funding has taken control of mainstream media and fact checking organisations to promulgate ideological narratives and censor dissenting voices. Headlines, news stories about events, and even facts themselves are being selectively altered and manipulated.

This is, as Orwell suggested, a means of controlling what people think, how groups of people respond to events and each other, and is being used to justify acts that without this censorship and misinformation would be seen as repugnant by most people.

Today, the power of the press is not to share the truth about everything; it is the power to control what everyone thinks about everything.

The next part in my Current day comparisons to Orwell’s 1984 can be found here.

Part One of my Curent day comparison to Orwell’s 1984 can be found here.

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