George Orwell mistakenly assumed that obfuscating language designed to glorify criminal acts would be invented and normalized by government. At least in the U.S., that function is outsourced to government’s most loyal and eager servants: establishment journalists. A principal reason why the government has been able to engage with impunity in the extremism and lawlessness of the last decade is because most journalists refuse even to describe it as what it is.
I’m not sure that Greenwald is correct that the principal reason behind the torture abuses, etc. is establishment media – I think the gradual usurping of the government by the excecutive branch is slightly more complex and deep a problem than merely a journalistic failure, but certainly in these recent decades the press has been a major part of this collapse of liberty – and we are all to some degree complicit.
