The Ministry of Truth Media: Winston Enjoyed the Work

The Twitter Files and the Ministry of Truth Media (full series)
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Apologies Without End | Winston Enjoyed the Work

Winston Enjoyed the Work

A question was asked at the outset of this analysis: If today’s press had become the “Ministry of Truth Media,” would those participating recognize the offense or celebrate it?

A June 2022 Pew Research Center survey revealed 75 percent of today’s journalists were “very proud of their work,” 70 percent often felt “excited about their work,” and 77 percent said they would “go into the news industry all over again.” Asked if they were “reporting the news accurately,” 65 percent of journalists said they did a “very” or “somewhat” good job of this.

Consistent with the rest of the polling, only 35 percent of the news consumers agreed the reporters were giving accurate reports, while 43 percent believed the media did a “very” or “somewhat” bad job of reporting accurately.

In one striking demonstration of the corporate media’s healthy self-regard, Jeff Gerth asked the New York Times to comment on its coverage of the Russia collusion hoax.

“In a statement to CJR, the Times continued to stand by its reporting, noting not only the prizes it had won but substantiation of the paper’s reporting by various investigations,” wrote Gerth, of the response he received. The newspaper claimed in the response that it had “thoroughly pursued credible claims, fact-checked, edited, and ultimately produced ground-breaking journalism that has proven true time and again.”

That weak-sauce answer was typical of what Gerth heard from most others. “I reached out to more than sixty journalists; only about half responded,” wrote Gerth in his conclusion. “Of those who did, more than a dozen agreed to be interviewed on the record. However, not a single major news organization made available a newsroom leader to talk about their coverage.”

The deliberately contrived assertion that the president was a Kremlin agent destabilized the functioning of the American government for years—arguably it continues to do so. Such damage inflicted by an enemy nation would be justification for a proportionally destructive attack on the regime responsible. But this assault on American democracy was cooked up within our borders by partisan political actors, who asked for and received extensive assistance from the highest levels of our corporate media.

This scandal should rank just behind Watergate, and co-equal with anything else, as one of the worst in living memory. As a media event it is without rival, because rather than reporting the corruption, the corporate media was a collaborator in it.

That much was made clear in Jeff Gerth’s analysis.

The Twitter Files revealed even more mis-coverage, cover-ups, and suppression of news, escalating in severity from 2017 forward. Then came the serially botched and suppressed stories during the biggest public health crisis of the past century, similar acts of omission and commission in response to the Hunter Biden laptop, and much else that made 2020 a year of corrupt news like none before it.

The perverse result is a corporate press that feels wonderful about themselves, and a public that distrusts them like never before.

In one sense it has been unfair to compare today’s legacy media to Winston Smith.

Winston may have also reported loving his job, but he knew full well he wasn’t reporting the news accurately. But some of his coworkers, like much of today’s Ministry of Truth Media, didn’t have this level of self-awareness.

“Parsons was Winston’s fellow-employee at the Ministry of Truth,” Orwell wrote of one of them. “He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.”

As the Twitter Files demonstrates, the destruction of corporate media credibility has coincided with the rise of independent journalists who have nothing to trade on but their credibility curiosity. They don’t eat if they don’t tell the truth. The more of them we have, the less we’ll pay attention to what Parsons produces for the Ministry of Truth.

This article was first published in the March/April 2023 issue of Capital Research magazine.