Orwell’s Warning: Does the Media Reveal Truth or Manufacture Illusion?

Though George Orwell is most famous for his last two books, Animal Farm and 1984, his essays cannot be neglected. Orwell’s essays are significant for their moral clarity, plainspoken prose, and fearless engagement with power, language, and truth. Orwell exposed how political language distorts reality and how intellectual dishonesty enables oppression. His essays have endured because they model a rare union of ethical seriousness, stylistic precision, and civic responsibility.

While reading Keith Gessen's introduction to All Art Is Propaganda, this passage especially struck home.

Orwell's voice as a writer had been formed before Spain, but Spain gave him a jolt--not the fighting or the injury [EdNote: He was shot in the neck by a sniper while fighting in the Spanish Civil War], though these had their effects, but the calculated campaign of deception he saw in the press when he got back, waged by people who knew better.

"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper," Orwell recalled, "but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed... kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history."  

This insight reverberates through Orwell's work for the rest of his life.  

For anyone paying attention, it should be a recurring theme throughout our own lifetimes. What is true? What's really going on?

It takes work, discernment and wisdom to see through the fog, and in some cases we'll never really know what the story really is. What we can do, however, be willing to set things on the shelf until we know more or it becomes irrelevant to know. It takes courage to say, "I don't know" when everyone else is clamoring for you to take a position.

My father was once called to jury duty for a trial the required a verdict with regards to a serious crime. Both sides painted a compelling argument for guilt or innocence. It became clear that one side was lying, but their arguments were so carefully laid out that he had no idea which side was lying and which was telling the truth.

To me, it seems clear that a measured skepticism is the only way to engage today's news media. This means questioning sources, incentives, framing, and omissions while still valuing verified reporting and evidence. Uncritical acceptance invites manipulation; total cynicism invites ignorance. And sometimes we just don't know.