A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power.
Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum by the ‘mainstream’ media. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly. Winston Smith’s work for the Ministry of Truth requires that he destroys documents that contradict state propaganda:
‘When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building’.
(Orwell, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, 1949, Penguin edition, 1982, p. 34)
The interests of power, hinging on the domination of an ignorant population, are robustly maintained:
‘In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.’
(Ibid., p. 36)
As the Party slogan puts it:
‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’
(Ibid., p. 31)
In today’s fictional ‘democracies’, the workings of propaganda are more subtle. Notably, there is a yawning chasm between the rhetoric of leaders’ professed concern for human rights, peace and democracy, and the realpolitik of empire, exploitation and control.


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