https://redsails.org/on-orwell/
Why does the above critique of Orwell by Roderic Day ignore the below point of Noam Chomsky?
https://orwellsociety.com/chomsky-orwell-and-the-myth-of-press-freedom/
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-90th-birthday/
Chomsky begins by citing the Preface Orwell wrote on ‘The Freedom of the Press’ for Animal Farm, in 1945. Somewhat ironically, the Preface was not included in the original publication – for reasons unknown. In fact, it did not see the light of day until it was discovered amongst his papers by Ian Angus and handed to Orwell’s biographer Bernard Crick, who provided his own introduction when it appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in September 1972.
Chomsky says that Orwell, as the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, is normally associated with the suppression of thought in dystopian, authoritarian societies. Lesser known, according to Chomsky, is Orwell’s stress on “thought-control” in supposedly free societies such as England. Here a subtle system of censorship operates which means that unpopular ideas are rarely heard. Going to Orwell’s precise words:
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. … The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
Orwell may have been writing on censorship in the 1940s and the suppression of anti-Stalin views – but his views are equally relevant to an understanding of the media today.
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