“How many fingers am I holding up?” says the Party torturer, O’Brian, to the hapless Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984.
The right answer isn’t “four” or “five.” The right answer is whatever
number O’Brian says it is. That is how totalitarians and warlords and
authoritarians of all kinds have behaved throughout the ages. Truth is
what these folks say it is, not what the facts proclaim. And if you
persist in naming a factual number of fingers, then into prison with
you, or off with your head. That’s if the totalitarian has already
seized power: if he is only in the larval stage, you may simply be
accused of spouting fake news.
We find ourselves living in a new age of O’Brians. How many
journalists and truth-tellers around the world have been murdered,
executed after a quasi-legal process, imprisoned, or exiled? When will
we build a memorial wall to them, with all of their names inscribed?
And why do they matter? Because knowing what the power-holders are
doing—in our name if it’s a democracy, or in the name of some abstract
concept—fatherland, blood, soil, gods, virtue, kingship—is the only way
the citizens of any society can begin to hold those power-holders to
account. If a society has any pretense to being other than a serfdom, a
free and independent press whose journalists have the right to dig into
the factual subsoil of a story is the primary defense against
encroaching winner-takes-all powercreep.
We’re living in the midst of a war being waged against this kind of
journalism: the evidence-based, truth-telling kind. In the United
States, the president has admitted that he spews out non-truths to keep
the journos spinning. His aim is to confuse the public, so that the
citizens—not knowing what to believe—will ultimately believe nothing. In
a country with no ideals left, high-level lawbreakers and corruption
will have free reign. Who can even object to those who sell out their
country if there isn’t much of a country left? ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/margaret-atwood-if-we-lose-the-free-press-we-cease-to-be-a-democracy/
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