{"id":33995,"date":"2018-05-07T06:04:50","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T11:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33995"},"modified":"2018-05-07T06:04:50","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T11:04:50","slug":"2018-when-orwells-1984-stopped-being-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33995","title":{"rendered":"2018: When Orwell\u2019s 1984 stopped being fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2018: When Orwell\u2019s 1984 stopped being fiction<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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This is the moment when a newspaper claiming to uphold that most essential function in a liberal democracy \u2013 acting as a watchdog on power \u2013 formally abandons the task. This is the moment when it positively embraces the role of serving as a mouthpiece for the government. The tell is in one small word in a headline on today\u2019s Guardian\u2019s front page: \u201cRevealed\u201d.<\/p>\n

When I trained as a journalist, we reserved a \u201cRevealed\u201d or an \u201cExposed\u201d for those special occasions when we were able to bring to the reader information those in power did not want known. These were the rare moments when as journalists we could hold our heads high and claim to be monitoring the centres of power, to be fulfilling our sacred duty as the fourth estate.<\/p>\n

But today\u2019s Guardian\u2019s \u201cexclusive\u201d story \u201cRevealed: UK\u2019s push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance<\/a>\u201d is doing none of this. Nothing the powerful would want hidden from us is being \u201crevealed\u201d. No one had to seek out classified documents or speak to a whistleblower to bring us this \u201crevelation\u201d. Everyone in this story \u2013 the journalist Patrick Wintour, an anonymous \u201cWhitehall official\u201d, and the named politicians and think-tank wonks \u2013 is safely in the same self-congratulatory club, promoting a barely veiled government policy: to renew the Cold War against Russia.<\/p>\n

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It is no accident that the government chose the Guardian as the place to publish this \u201cexclusive\u201d press release. That single word \u201cRevealed\u201d in the headline serves two functions that reverse the very rationale for liberal, watchdog-style journalism.<\/p>\n

First, it is designed to disorientate the reader in Orwellian \u2013 or maybe Lewis Caroll \u2013 fashion, inverting the world of reality. The reader is primed for a disclosure, a secret, and then is spoonfed familiar government propaganda: that the tentacles of a Russian octopus are everywhere, that the Reds are again under our beds \u2013 or at least, poisoning our door handles.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2018: When Orwell\u2019s 1984 stopped being fiction This is the moment when a newspaper claiming to uphold that most essential function in a liberal democracy \u2013 acting as a watchdog on power \u2013 formally abandons the task. This is the moment when it positively embraces the role of serving as a mouthpiece for the government. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[1212,5109,149,1211,379,20045,462,512,20046,655,6917,2080],"class_list":["post-33995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-1212","tag-anti-russia","tag-cold-war","tag-george-orwell","tag-government","tag-jonathan-cook-blog","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-patrick-wintour","tag-propaganda","tag-the-guardian","tag-united-kingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33996,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33995\/revisions\/33996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}