From President Donald Trump’s tweets to Russian misinformation, George Orwell foresaw the power of “alternative facts”. His was the prophecy of today’s fake news world.
In January 2017, just after the then spokeswoman for Trump defended what most people call lies as “alternative facts”, sales in the United States of 1984 –Orwell’s powerful book written in 1949 foreseeing a dystopian world – increased by 9,500 per cent in four days, catapulting this classic to the top of the American best-seller list.
Collins Dictionary identified “fake news” as the new word of 2017, a year after the Oxford English Dictionary bestowed a similar honour on “post-truth”. Orwell saw both concepts coming with astonishing foresight. He did more than any other writer to try to defend language and culture against coercion and manipulation.
You can see Orwell’s dystopian vision reflected in today’s battle to control the news, the past and the language. In a precise foreboding of Trump’s government by Twitter, Orwell warned: “Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller”.
Today, Orwell’s 1984 is everywhere – from the flood of deliberate disinformation from the Russian government designed to undermine democracy to the sustained assault on media impartiality from the Trump White House.
In Malta, in poisonous blogs purveying conspiracy theories, half-truths and unsubstantiated allegations, which have created a self-reinforcing silo – a group-think echo-chamber – for those reading them. In party-political newspapers and television stations relaying self-serving propaganda pumping out their own version of events. The range and spread of information, some of it fake but all of it political, is now a threat to the public truth that a liberal democracy requires.
The overused term “Orwellian” has a specific resonance today and one that Orwell would have recognised. A world in which there is no verifiable truth but only varied forms of propaganda. In which lies are repeated so often and so insistently that they become reality. Where the audience is so exhausted and baffled by falsehoods that it no longer knows or cares where the truth lies.
Before he wrote 1984 (and Animal Farm), Orwell laid out his nightmare vision of a post-truth world in an essay entitled ‘Looking back on the Spanish Civil War’. Having witnessed the way both Nationalist and Republican sides competed to mould perception through propaganda, that experience informed his overwhelming fear: “The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history… If the leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.”
The range and spread of information, some of it fake but all of it political, is now a threat to the public truth that a liberal democracy requires
President Vladimir Putin of Russia manages a steady flow of disinformation and fake news through the Kremlin’s troll farms and RT (formerly Russia Today) to sow division and confusion and, in the Russian phrase, to “powder the brains” not only domestically but worldwide.
Russia has both a long history of disinformation campaigns and a political culture largely untroubled by concerns for truth. Hence, the popular Russian expression: “There is no truth in the news (Izvestia) and no news in the truth (Pravda).” In the words of The Economist, Russia has taken to the dark side of social media “like a rat in a drain-pipe” not just for internal use but for export too.
Orwell believed in an objective truth, a set of facts and realities that can be uncovered despite all the doublespeak and newspeak. As he wrote in his seminal essay on the Spanish Civil War in 1942: “However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.” There are only facts and lies, with nothing in between. Half-truths are unacceptable.
Orwell was a reporter – as well as a writer – with an ingrained instinct to witness, verify and report. He had what he himself called “the power of facing unpleasant facts”. He even foresaw the polarised “debate” on the internet in which “everyone is simply putting a ‘case’ with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view”.
Orwell believed in the existence of an elusive but empirical truth and the human spirit that continues to seek it out despite the fake news distorting language and the alternative truths that have become the currency of modern power.
Fake news and sophisticated disinformation campaigns pose extremely challenging threats to democratic systems. As we have seen with Cambridge Analytica, they have become more of a problem thanks to the new digital platforms that take untruths and spread them round the world.
Even when the news disseminated is not untrue it may be partisan or it may be selective. This has always been true of political argument but it has previously taken place before in plain sight. Political argument has declared itself as political argument. Now it is arriving in readers’ inboxes dressed as impartial truth.
There is a growing debate on how to address these digital platforms without undermining the benefits of social media and the overriding concept of freedom of speech. To maintain an open, democratic system, governments, media businesses and consumers of news must work together. But there comes a moment where a new market is mature and powerful enough to need new rules. This moment has come for online communication. Social media’s Wild West needs to be tamed.
But, above all, news literacy – the ability to spot facts from fiction – and strong professional journalism are crucial. It is more important than ever for newsrooms to invest in professional journalists to maintain a public discourse with integrity and uphold a democracy with vitality.
The news industry must provide high-quality journalism to build public trust and correct fake news and disinformation. The requirements of due impartiality and accuracy need to be rigorously enforced. Schools and universities must make the promotion of informing people about news literacy a high priority. Our students should be taught to question and analyse critically and to compare and form their own opinions objectively.
As consumers of news we, the readers, should follow a diversity of news sources and be sceptical about what we read and watch. Not all claims to truth are equal. Some are more equal than others. We must learn to distinguish between the two.