The Ministry of Tweet
The President recently tweeted that the American public is finally wising up, high praise for us dweebs out here in the hinterlands. He’s talking about a survey that shows how few people believe the news media is truthful. You know, media like the New York Times, NBC, the Washington Post, CNN. Wow! I remember reading Orwell’s 1984 as a kid in high school and being chilled by Big Brother’s revisionist history. The Ministry of Truth needed entire departments to rewrite past events to make current events fit into what preceded them. “It’s a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. …. Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Easy, just change history.
These days we don’t change history to match our beliefs, we just say facts are lies. Ignorance is Strength. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Faux news, fake history. Trump and the alt-right have managed to convince the public the truth is whatever they want to believe. Fox News, fair and balanced. Facts? We don’t need no stinking facts!! The President is a liar but plenty of folks think the press is fabricating stories to defame him. He would like to pull the broadcast license of NBC. He’d really like to shut down most of the news media and replace it with the Ministry of Tweet. Big Brother is in office right now.
If Big Brother had a real agenda, we’d be in a sinister world of trouble, but thankfully the Donald is only interested in self-aggrandisement and increasing his brand’s net worth. If he had any ideas or ideals, we’d be in deep doo-doo. He’s no neo-con and he’s not much interested in policies. One day he’s against this, next day he’s all in. Only a craven empty suit could flip flop one hundred and eighty degrees then announce that he always believed the flop. Newspeak for Dummies. Rather than change yesterday’s headlines, just convince the proles the headlines were lies, a helluva lot easier. Ignorance, once bliss, is now strength. Truth, once the thing that would set you free, is now a shackle.
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Tags: 1984, Newspeak, Orwell
Sure, fake news might be a real thing. Words can twist and spin to sound like the opposite of what they really mean. President Donald “Bone-Spur” Trump might have a short attention span, and the ability to change his mind faster than a pack of teenagers at Baskin-Robbins trying to pick a flavor… “Ohhh, you’re getting Blueberry-Candy Corn? I want that! Can I change mine?”
But then again maybe, just maybe, this president is so deeply involved in the abstruse details floating inside the big picture, that he’s constantly discovering new information which affects the outcome of his decisions. He may not change his mind on a whim, no, with his thirst for knowledge as well as political and historical events he’s constantly finding out, always in the nick of time what he must do to get policy done right, and properly implemented.
Of course, and admittedly more likely, he could have one big brain fart after another, unleashed on an unsuspecting public who know they smelt it, their Senators and Representatives all the while mostly quiet lest they’re blamed as the ones who dealt it.
I didn’t realize until he told us yesterday that he had the world’s greatest memory. And all this time I just thought his flip-flop was due to forgetfulness.
The more he screams “fake,” the closer we are to the truth.
But seriously, as a journalist, I find that people are often shocked to discover that I can’t just write anything I want about anyone and get it printed. That I have to disclose to my editors and in the article itself any interests of my own related to an article I’ve worked on. That I have to give my editors contact info for any sources I’ve used or people I interviewed. None of these principles are in practice on Breitbart, for example, and many other news sources on the right. The are adhered to, however, in the main stream media that Trump and his cronies rail about all the time.
Sheesh. At the bottom of all this chaos, IMO, is the successful destruction of our public education system. People now are so irretrievably ignorant now, its terrifying.
Which reminds me that one of my small pleasures these days is watching the NBC comedy The Good Place, a very strange little comedy that has become a vehicle for discussing moral philosophy. It’s pretty funny.
Your trouble is that you write for the faux news media. Even a mojority of Democrats polled on their trust of mainstream media say they don’t trust it. Republicans, well, they drank the Kool-Aid long ago when Fox came along with their fair and balanced editorial news. Walter Cronkite, roll over in yer grave!
I love The Good Place, Rosemary. The Trolley episode really took moral philosophy to the streets.