What Orwell Didn’t Know

A passionate, thought-provoking, sometimes incendiary look at the role of propaganda in America today.Propaganda, manipulation, spin, control. It has ever been thus – or has it? On the eve of the 60th anniversary of George Orwell’s classic essay on propaganda, “Politics and the English Language”, a group of prominent writers have been invited to explore what Orwell didn’t – or couldn’t – know. Their responses, framed in pithy, focused essays, range far and wide: from the effect of television and computing, to the vast expansion of knowledge about how our brains respond to symbolic messages, to the merger of journalism and entertainment, to lessons learned during and after a half-century of totalitarianism. Together they paint a portrait of a political culture in which propaganda and mind control are alive and well (albeit in forms and places that would have surprised Orwell). The pieces in this anthology sound alarm bells about the manipulation and misinformation in today’s politics, and offer guideposts for a journalism attuned to Orwellian tendencies in the 21st century.