Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [24]

Our nominally free news media are required to present ‘balanced’ coverage, in which every ‘truth’ is immediately neutered by an equal and opposite one. Every day public opinion is the target of rewritten history, official amnesia and outright lying, all of which is benevolently termed ‘spin’, as if it were no more harmful than a ride on a merry-go-round. We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise. We believe and doubt at the same time – it seems a condition of political thought in a modern superstate to be permanently of at least two minds on most issues. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 24

Note

The editor turns the novel’s fiction back on contemporary media culture, culminating in the brisk, devastating formulation ‘We know better than what they tell us, yet hope otherwise’ — the everyday domestic doublethink the book is meant to expose.