Sixty years of Orwellian spin

Sixty years of Orwellian spin

Dec 10th 2010, 18:42 by M.S.

The Economist

IN CASE anyone didn't understand that Fox News routinely hews to the messaging guidelines drawn up by Republican political strategists, we have evidence from a leaked email that Fox News's Washington bureau chief instructed his staff to hew to a messaging guideline drawn up by Republican political strategists, by referring to the health-insurance reform public option as a "government option" or "government plan". Jack Shafer thinks this is just fine. Anyone inclined to give credence to Mr Shafer's view is advised to read the next paragraph, where Mr Shafer advocates renaming Social Security the "Government Ponzi Scheme". Anyway, Jon Chait objects:

Standard news practice is to simply keep using terms that have come into the public discourse and gained wide usage even if it is not the most technically accurate or neutral term. If you had a left-wing news network that decided it can no longer refer to military spending as "defense" because that presumes it is never used in an aggressive way, that would be an act of bias, regardless of the philosophical merits.

I would clarify Mr Chait's point: it's not a crime to start playing with words this way, but if you do it, it makes it clear that you have an ideological or political agenda. There's nothing wrong with having an agenda, as long as you're willing to own up to it. That's the problem with Fox News: they won't own up to their agenda, and it's ridiculous.

Anyway, if we are  going to start referring to government programmes however we want to, I think pushing back against the branding of military spending as "defence" would be an excellent place to start. The reason to stop referring to military spending as "defence" is not so much that it's not always used in a defensive way as that it's almost never used in a defensive way. Perhaps the war in Afghanistan could be considered a defensive measure, but prior to that engagement America hadn't fought a war to defend its own territory since...1812? 1865? Maybe 1945, if you consider the Philippines to be American territory (though "defence of our colonies" doesn't have such a nice ring to it), or the firebombing and planned conquest of Japan to have been a defence of Hawaii. As for the wars we've fought elsewhere, fighting wars to defend other people's territory gets you into an epistemological zone where the use of the word "defence" needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis.

The people who fought and won the second world war didn't feel the need to play this particular word game to be confident they were fighting a just war. The armed forces fought Japan and Germany under a government department correctly labeled according to the activity it was responsible for: the Department of War. In the aftermath, the military apparently recognised that "war" wasn't the most popular way of branding their field of activity. So in 1947, the moniker was changed to the neutral-sounding National Military Establishment, and two years later it became the Department of Defence. This was right about the time "1984" was being published.

The fact that this militarist spin is 60 years old doesn't make it any less biased. I think it would be entirely responsible, neutral and accurate to take the word "defence" out of the non-sports lexicon. If the government won't go back to the Department of War, the least we could do is stop actively participating in this Orwellian farce in which the invasion of Iraq is carried out by the Department of Defence. Call it military spending. That's what it is. Anyone who's confident that fighting a war is a good idea should have the guts to call it by its proper name.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/12/accuracy_names?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/sixtyyearsoforwellianspin