Orwellian
Sixty years ago this week, on June 8, 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s novel was published.
Today, it is still going strong and has sold millions of copies.
More than that, it has left an indellible impact on society.
Terms created in the book – Big Brother (before it was a TV show), thought police, 1984, even ‘Orwellian’ are today part of the common vocabulary and immediatly convey concepts of totalitarian control.
Orwell’s book was a stunning indictment of Stalinist Russia, but it was also a greater indictment and warning to a society that increasingly paid less and less honor to the idea of personal privacy or individual thought.
This is applicable today, long after Stalin and the Soviet Union is gone and buried.
What makes this particularly interesting is that Orwell was a journalist.
The Daily Mail (UK) recently referred to Orwell as “arguably the best journalist and essayist in the English language”.
Yet had Orwell written 1984 as journalism it would have been long forgotten.
Arguably it would also have made little impact, and left no lasting imprint on our culture or our minds.
What makes 1984 a towering work of ‘journalism’ is that his work had real impact. It made a remarkable social statement- the kind of statement that journalists long to make all their lives.
Orwell seized the mechanisms of writing and the power of print and married it to a searing social commentary. Had he adhered to the ‘rules’ of journalism (as they were and are still taught at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University (among other places)), Orwell would have left no mark. Dry facts. Emotionless. Passionless. Oatmeal.
Orwell was a journalist but he also was an artist. He took journalism and pushed it through the construct of the novel to create a journalism that was far more far-reaching and far more powerful than any Pulitzer Prize winner I can think of.
As reporting news becomes a commodity, perhaps the only path for not just the survival of journalism, but its resurrection as a powerful institution might be to forget our ideas of ‘balance’ and ‘fairness’ and ‘objectivity’ and take off the gloves and use all our powers to craft a vision of the world for others that reflects a stong bias and strong point of view.
Otherwise, what is journalism worth?
As Winston says to Julia when they are caught by the thought police: “We are the dead”.
