Orwell Exposed the Cowardice of Journalists and Intellectuals

Barry Brownstein

George Orwell had little hope that the lies of totalitarians would be exposed by a free press. His essay “The Freedom of the Press” was intended as the preface to Animal Farm, but was not published until 1972. Orwell revealed that the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Information (MOI) (created during the Second World War) advised Orwell’s publisher not to publish Animal Farm since it would be offensive to “Russian Soviets.”

Orwell’s thesis was that journalists, not the government, are the biggest censors:

[T]he chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.

Today’s cowardly journalists have suppressed stories of Hunter Biden’s laptop, doubts about the efficiency of masks and lockdowns, questionable safety profiles of vaccines, concerns that vaccines didn’t prevent transmission, questions about U.S. policy in Ukraine, and challenges to the global warming orthodoxy. 

While the Biden administration did twist the arms of social media companies to censor ordinary people, it didn’t have to censor journalists. Orwell wrote: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” He explained, 

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

In the following paragraph, Orwell painted a portrait of our time. As you read, substitute vaccines, gender reassignment surgery for teens, green energy, etc., for “Soviet Russia”: 

At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to criticise the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to criticise our own.

Orwell was not surprised by “the servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda,” even though they had “no direct pressure to falsify their opinions.”

Big Pharma’s power was already an issue almost eighty years ago. Orwell observed, “Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed because of ‘vested interests’. The best-known case is the patent medicine racket.”

Unfortunately, despite raising the alarm, Orwell adds a qualifier to his support for freedom of speech:

If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way.

Today, of course, the harm to the community qualifier is used by Google and others to censor legitimate differences of opinion. 

Just as Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom, Orwell warned, “It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.”

Today, authoritarians claim they are defending democracy yet do so by illiberal means. Orwell observed these tactics and reported “a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means.” 

The enemies to be crushed included “those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines.” Today’s censors also use this misinformation argument. 

Worse, Orwell explains intellectuals justified Stalin’s purges by claiming the victims’ “heretical opinions … ‘objectively’ harmed the régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations.” 

This is not an essay to consider the cancellation of health professionals, authors, and academics. But if you believe intellectuals oppose “false accusations” in service of their perceived good cause, Orwell would say you are wrong.

Orwell observed great enthusiasm for Stalinist Russia was “only a symptom of the general weakening of the western liberal tradition.” He warned, “If you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.” 

Any tribal adoption of an “orthodoxy” is problematic. Orwell observed, “The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.”

Can Western civilization survive the illiberalism Orwell observed? Orwell had his doubts:

[I]intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice. 

Orwell wrote, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Today,  journalists and intellectuals tell us that freedom of expression is not essential; rather than being a condition by which civilization progresses, freedom of expression is a menace to “democracy.” With such beliefs, Orwell would warn, we are creating our own dystopia.

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Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.  He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership, and his essays have appeared in publications such as the Foundation for Economic Education and Intellectual Takeout.  To receive Barry’s essays in your inbox, visit mindsetshifts.com  

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Biden's $50,000-per-year journalist tax credit estimated to cost taxpayers $1.6B

By Haris Alic - The Washington Times - Thursday, November 4, 2021 

The lucrative $50,000-per-year journalist tax break that Democrats have tucked within President Biden’s multitrillion-dollar social welfare bill is estimated to cost taxpayers more than $1.6 billion over the next decade.

A new analysis of the legislation by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a special congressional panel made up of 10 senior lawmakers from both chambers of Congress, found that taxpayers would be on the hook for more than $1.6 billion if the tax credit becomes law.
The credit would allow “local news” outlets to receive a quarterly tax credit, “equal to 50%” of a journalist’s wages up to a cap of $12,500-per-quarter.

Overall, eligible outlets could receive as much as $50,000 annually per journalist in tax breaks through the program in its first year. In subsequent years, the credit would drop to 30% of a journalist’s wages per quarter. Democrats propose to let the tax credit expire after five years unless Congress votes to renew.......To Read More....

 Robin's Take - Another outrage!  Democrats trying to pay back "journalists" for being grossly partisan hacks protecting them at every turn while doing all they can to harm the right

Why Progressives Make Bad Journalists

By James Ostrowski

I wrote Progressivism: A Primer to explain certain anomalies in the behavior of progressives that I had noticed over a number of years.  For example, I found that progressives were rarely amenable to rational persuasion.  Facts, logic and even experience rarely changed their minds.  You couldn’t really argue with a progressive.  You would argue; they would fight.  They would get angry, insult and change the subject.  They never stopped proposing new government programs, spending and laws, though they appeared to lack a grand vision of what they were trying to accomplish.

To explain all this and more, I propounded an eight-part definition of progressivism.  Thus, “progressivism is:.......That being the case, progressivism can be seen as a self-imposed mental disability in which the progressive filters out of his perception and cognition any facts that disturb or disrupt the therapeutic function of his political mindset and, at the same time, highlights or exaggerates any facts that would appear to buttress the notion that government action can solve any particular problem......Thus, we can conclude that progressives generally make bad journalists. The great casualty of progressive journalism is, of course, the truth.  Since progressives utterly dominate the media and journalism, it is no surprise that the vast majority of Americans remain ignorant of the true cause of America’s continuing decline, progressivism itself.......To Read More....

Zone of Reality: Castro Notes

By Rich Kozlovich 

Last week I outlined my contempt for the media, and this included the international media, who is complicit in this whole cover up of misinformation, misdirection and lies of omission....as well as lies of commission. I know...I know....there is no such thing as a conspiracy! Really? How about a conspiracy of paradigms? They all think alike and they all act alike. Do they ever have meetings to outline their duplicitous actions? Normally I would say no, but there actually have been reports of such meetings taking place at various media operations. Do the heads of these operations talk to one another? I think so!

Over forty years ago I worked at a newspaper and noticed how all the news seemed to be about the same things. Is this all there is going on I asked myself? Back in those days the United Press International (UPI) and the Associated Press (AP) dominated the news by supplying "news, photos, film and audio services to thousands of newspapers, magazines and radio and television stations for most of the twentieth century".

I realized that all the world's news was being controlled by a handful of people. The question then was; why did they pick what they wanted the world do see. I found that both of them seemed to focus on the same news, same journalists, the same story content and they clearly had a like minded approach to all of the world's news. Did they talk to each other?

I told a workmate of my conclusion and he laughed and looked at me like I was insane.  That was the response from almost everyone I talked to about this. I has taken over forty years for the rest of the world to catch up to me. 

Journalism's Worst Enemy in the World By Humberto Fontova

The question was answered on June 16 by the Committee to Protect Journalists' Executive Director, Joel Simon. The setting was a hearing on "Press Freedom in the Americas," held by the U.S. House of Representatives' Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. And quite interestingly, none of that very "press" in the "Americas" has seen fit to report this item.

(Editor's Note: I have inserted this next paragraph from the link above. It does not appear in the original article. RK)

"I would like to talk about Cuba, which is far and away the most repressive environment for the press in Latin America. In fact, Cuba is one of the most repressive countries in the world in this regard. There are 22 journalists currently jailed in Cuba, which means the country ranks third behind Iran and China.

Hummmm?

So let's ask... Dan Rather if he knows who jails and tortures the most journalists on earth... Andrea Mitchell... Barbara Walters... Dianne Sawyer... Eleanor Clift... CNN's former Havana Bureau chief Lucia Newman (nowadays with Al Jazeera)

OK, enough with the "fun." (All quotes above are fully documented, by the way.)…..

These pictures compare his (Ariel Sigler's) condition upon arrest in 2003 to those upon release last week. Now imagine the international media uproar (!!!) if something remotely similar could be shown regarding those other prisoners in Cuba (Guantanamo)! Now see if you can find this heroic man (Ariel Sigler)'s pictures anywhere in the MSM.