We are the Thought Police

Orwell's Big Brother never showed up. Instead of centralized Iraq war propaganda, we have an America in which the public and the press jointly impose their own controls.

Editor's note: This essay is excerpted from the anthology "What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics," edited by András Szántó. A related conference on journalism and public discourse takes place at the New York Public Library on Nov. 7.

By Michael Massing

Read more: George Orwell, Opinion, Iraq War

Nov. 6, 2007 | At first glance, the war in Iraq would seem to represent the realization of George Orwell's darkest fears. In "Politics and the English Language," he expressed alarm over how political speech and language, degraded by euphemism, vagueness, and cliché, was used to defend the indefensible, to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. Three years later, in "1984," Orwell offered an even grimmer vision, one in which an all-powerful Party, working through an all-seeing Ministry of Truth, manipulates and intimidates the public by pelting it with an endless series of distorted and fabricated messages.

The Bush administration, in pushing for the war in Iraq, seems to have done much the same. It concocted lurid images to stir fear ("weapons of mass destruction," the prospect that the "smoking gun" could become a "mushroom cloud"). It asserted as fact information known to be false (the purported ties between Iraq and al Qaeda). It clipped and cropped intelligence data to fit its policy goals (dropping important qualifiers from the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq). It worked up snippets and scraps of unsubstantiated evidence into a slick package of deception and misrepresentation (Colin Powell's speech at the United Nations). And it created a whole glossary of diversionary terms -- "preemptive war" for unprovoked aggression, "shock and awe" for a devastating bombing campaign, "coalition" for an invading force that was overwhelmingly American -- all of which helped win the White House broad domestic support for a war that most of the rest of the world had decisively rejected.

Yet in many key respects, the Iraq war has diverged from Orwell's dystopic vision. Orwell had expected advances in technology to allow the ruling elite to monopolize the flow of information and through it to control the minds of the masses. In reality, though, those advances have set off an explosion in the number and diversity of news sources, making efforts at control all the harder to achieve. The 24-hour cable news channels, the constantly updated news Web sites, news aggregators like Google News, post-it-yourself sites such as YouTube, ezines, blogs, and digital cameras have all helped feed an avalanche of information about world affairs. In Iraq, reporters embedded with troops have been able via the Internet to file copy directly from the field. Through "milblogs," soldiers have been able to share with the outside world their impressions about their experiences on the ground. Even as the war has dragged on, it has given rise to a shelf-full of revealing books, written by not only generals and journalists but also captains, lieutenants, privates, national guardsmen, and even deserters.

In short, no war has been more fully chronicled or minutely analyzed than this one. And, as a result, the Bush administration has been unable to spin it as it would like. The spreading insurgency, the surging violence, the descent into chaos -- all have been thoroughly documented by journalists and others, and public support for the war has steadily ebbed as a result.

Yet even amid this information glut, the public remains ill-informed about many key aspects of the war. This is due less to any restrictions imposed by the government, or to any official management of language or image, than to controls imposed by the public itself. Americans -- reluctant to confront certain raw realities of the war -- have placed strong filters and screens on the facts and images they receive. This is particularly true regarding the conduct of U.S. troops in the field. The U.S. military in Iraq is an occupation army, and like most such forces, it has engaged in many troubling acts. With American men and women putting their lives at risk in a very hostile environment, however, the American public has little appetite for news about such acts, and so it sets limits on what it is willing to hear about them. The Press -- ever attuned to public sensitivities -- will, on occasion, test those limits, but generally respects them. The result is an unstated, unconscious, but nonetheless potent co-conspiracy between the public and the press to muffle some important truths about the war. In a disturbing twist on the Orwellian nightmare, the American people have become their own thought police, purging the news of unwanted and unwelcome features with an efficiency that government censors and military flacks can only envy.

Sometimes the public defines its limits by expressing outrage. The running of a story that seems too unsettling, or the airing of an image that seems too graphic, can set off a storm of protest -- from Fox News and the Weekly Standard, bloggers and radio talk-show hosts, military families and enraged citizens -- all denouncing the messenger as unpatriotic, un-American, even treasonous. In this swirl of menace and hate, even the most determined journalist can feel cowed.

Kevin Sites can attest to this. A freelance cameraman, Sites in November 2004 covered the second battle of Fallujah for NBC News. On Nov. 13, he followed a squad of Marines into a mosque that had been the scene of intense fighting. On the ground lay several badly wounded Iraqis. Seeing one of them move, a Marine shouted, "He's fucking faking he's dead," then shot him, making sure that he was. Sites caught the moment on tape and sent it to NBC. The network aired the clip but halted it at the moment when the soldier actually began firing. "NBC has chosen not to air the most gruesome of the images," anchor Brian Williams explained. Other networks did the same. (On the Arab satellite networks, the clip was shown in full, and repeatedly.) Even with this editing, Sites received thousands of death threats and pieces of hate mail. "Dear Liberal Media Scumbag," went one, "I hope the next video clip out of Iraq I watch is an insurgent placing your severed head onto your back." Bloggers accused him of being a traitor and an antiwar activist.

Since then, the networks have aired very few clips that approach even the truncated version of Sites' report. Sites himself no longer works for the networks; rather, he's out on his own, posting video reports from around the world on Yahoo.com, where his audience is a fraction of what it once was. To find truly revealing footage about the war, it's necessary to seek out documentaries such as "The Ground Truth" and "The War Tapes," which play mainly before small elite audiences in art houses in the nation's largest cities.

In other cases, the public sets the limits of its tolerance through indifference and inattention, responding to reports of a shocking nature with a yawn and a sigh and thus causing these stories to wither and fade. The Haditha massacre is a good example. In March 2006, Time magazine reported that four months earlier, a group of Marines patrolling a remote village in western Iraq had lost one of its men to a roadside bomb. Furious, the soldiers had gone on a rampage, killing 15 unarmed men, women, and children. Initially, the Marines involved in the attack claimed that the civilians had died from the insurgent bomb, and the military accepted their report. But Time had obtained a copy of a videotape of the attack's aftermath and, based on it, and on interviews with eyewitnesses, concluded that a massacre might have occurred. "What happened in Haditha," correspondent Tim McGirk wrote, "is a reminder of the horrors faced by civilians caught in the middle of war -- and what war can do to the people who fight it."

All in all, it was an explosive report, presenting strong evidence of a Marine atrocity. Yet it stirred little public reaction, prompted no demands for an investigation, received scant follow-up from other news organizations. It was only two months later, when Rep. John Murtha denounced the slaughter at a press conference, declaring that the Marines had "killed innocent civilians in cold blood," that politicians began to pay attention to the episode, and that journalists began to write about it. Forced to investigate, the military determined that the Marines had killed not 15 but 24 civilians, and it initiated proceedings against eight of the soldiers.

From that point on, the massacre -- validated as newsworthy by a leading congressman -- received extensive coverage. Even so, it was framed as a rare exception, as an aberration from the otherwise commendable behavior of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. But, as William Langewiesche found in an investigation for Vanity Fair, the incident was not all that exceptional. The initial failure of the Marines to fully investigate the killings was due not to any conspiracy or cover-up but to the fact that the bloodshed was not regarded as anything out of the ordinary. "The killing of civilians," Langewiesche wrote, "has become so commonplace that the report of these particular ones barely aroused notice as it moved up the chain of command in Iraq." The debacle in Haditha grew out of the "normal operations in the war," he observed, operations that "make such carnage routine."

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