All Art is Propaganda, Facing Unpleasant Facts, George Orwell, The Betrayal of Dissent
In History, Literature, Orwell, George on June 25, 2009 at 7:31 pm
In 1946, George Orwell wrote: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.”
In his The Betrayal of Dissent: Beyond Orwell, Hitchens and the New American Century (Pluto, 2003), Scott Lucas writes that Orwell’s mission in practice was hardly as balanced as this declaration from the essay/manifesto “Why I Write” suggests. The “serious work” against surpassed that for, and against often substituted for understanding. Orwell’s “lack of economic and political theory,” Lucas writes, yielded an inconsistent “Socialism” Orwell himself declared “not doctrinaire, not even logical” that he defined primarily by attacking other leftists. Read the rest of this entry »
McChesney, Media, Monthly Review, Robert
In Journalism, McChesney, Robert, Media on June 10, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Robert McChesney teaches communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and hosts the radio program Media Matters. In his most recent book, The Political Economy of Media (Monthly Review, 2008), Professor McChesney examines the interconnecting influence of economics, history, sociology, and technology on journalism and media systems. He kindly took time this past April to speak to G&R.
G&R: One of the things you write about over and over in the book is how essential a free and independent media is to a functioning democracy. Is public broadcasting as we know it today—PBS and NPR—what you have in mind when you talk about this?
RM: I think that public broadcasting, or as I call it, public media, is definitely a big part of a viable media system in a self-governing society. That doesn’t mean specifically that NPR or PBS are what I have in mind. Read the rest of this entry »
