Never more true. Orwell should be required reading for anyone who works with, consumes, or tries to be one of the media—in short, everyone. This essay is an excellent place to start, and bonus points for having read Animal Farm and 1984 within the last 10 years (i.e., sometime after it was required for a class). Going back to look at my copies now, since I do not score the bonus points.
Addition:
Must be something in the air—found this just a little bit later in my Bloglines feed (from Believer Magazine):
BLVR: What is the hardest thing about filmmaking?
SS: I will say, and coming from someone who’s made some of the movies and TV I’ve made, it may seem disingenuous—but the hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear when creating anything. It’s the hardest thing in the world. It’s really easy to be obscure and elliptical and so fucking hard to be good and clear. It breaks people. Because you don’t often get encouragement to do that, to be good and clear.
Just when i think the slide toward theocracy can’t get worse: the Left Behind video game. Now you have the choice to play a 13-year-old prayer warrior blowing away anyone who resists your attempts to convert them, or you can play a minion of the AntiChrist. It may have been naive of me, but I really didn’t think that the violence of modern-day video games was something the Religious Right wanted to co-opt—they’ve been telling me for years that Grand Theft Auto will rot my brain, but apparently if virtual bloodshed’s done in the service of the Lord it’s good clean fun and great training for the future. I would be speechless if it didn’t frighten me so much.
Read this first. Then marvel at a governmental body who has the chutzpah to decide for the entire country that “bullshit” must be bleeped. Amaze yourself further that words far more offensive to the general populace are apparently OK, and then do a doubletake again at the thought that the FCC feels the need to police speech at all.
The First Amendment gets more tattered by the day—I just went to dinner with an old friend last night who told me he was accused of passing out subversive literature while working at a Boy Scout camp several years ago. His tracts? The Declaration of Independence and the Consitution. Time to brush up. And maybe this one for good measure.
A great article on the transition political journalism has undergone in the last twenty or so years. It touches on many points, among them herd mind, the myth of media objectivity, and best of all, ideas for how to make it better again from those within the field. PressThink, where it’s from, looks like a really solid resource for anyone who wants to self-educate on how politics gets covered and a lot of other media-related issues. [via Doc Searls]