bill moyers comes out swinging

"News is what people want to keep hidden, and everything else is publicity."

Salon has excerpted Moyers' address to the National Conference for Media Reform. A must-read for anyone trying to cope with our Orwellian times.

Without a trace of irony, the powers that be have appropriated the newspeak vernacular of George Orwell's "1984." ... In Orwell's "1984" the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society's dictionary, explains to the protagonist, Winston, "Don't you see? Don't you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050 at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we're having right now. The whole climate of thought," he said, "will be different. In fact, there will be no thought as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

As Moyers put it, "A democracy can die of too many lies." He's had it (and who hasn't?) with "the people who ... encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets; ... the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy."