Orwell and Huxley: Fake News in Context

[RonPrice]

FAKE

 

Fake news made its debut on TV in 1962 with That Was the Week That Was--a weekly comedy review. This review included a fake news segment and was anchored by David Frost who went on to host The Frost Report in 1966/67 which parodied a current events show. I began my pioneer-travelling life in the Canadian Bahá'í community in 1962 and, by 1967, I was living among the Inuit on Baffin Island which had no TV at that time.

 

In 1968 Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In became a weekly series which also featured a fake news segment usually anchored by Dick Martin. The fake news was introduced by a song that began: “What’s the news across the nation? / We have got the information / In a way we hope will amuse you.” By the time the program went off the air in 1973 I had become an international pioneer, teaching high school and living in South Australia.

 

Although Laugh-In went off the air in 1973, it took a mere two years for another weekly-sketch comedy to hit the screen: Saturday Night Live which debuted on 11 October 1975 just ten weeks before my second marriage. Both that program and my second marriage have been going for the last thirty-five years. -Ron Price with thanks to Ana Kothe, “When Fake Is More Real: Of Fools, Parody, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” Americana: Journal of Popular American Culture, Volume 6, No.2, Fall, 2007.

 

Can things like this which

we spend so much time on

be so very unimportant???

 

Is this entertainment permeation,

this spurious gratification, part of

our disillusionment over the lack

of a definition of culture and moral

solutions......this preference for fun

over edification........and part of the

very complexity of issues we face,

part of a new public discourse of

amusing ourselves to our death!(1)

 

Had we forgotten that alongside

Orwell's dark 1984 vision there was

another, slightly older, slightly less

well-known equally chilling vision:

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.(2)

 

A different kind of Big Brother

was required to deprive people

of their autonomy, maturity &

history. Huxley saw people as

coming to love-not even aware

of oppression-adore technology

that simply undoes....capacities

to think.He feared we would be

reduced to passivity & drown in

seas of utter triviality-irrelevance.

 

(1) Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985.

(2) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932.

 

Ron Price

10 February 2010

Revised on 11/2/’10

[LaurieAG]

Hi RonPrice,

 

Good point. Orson Wells did the first one on the radio in 1938 that induced mass hysteria.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio)

[RonPrice]

Good point, LaurieAG..........thanks.-Ron

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[RonPrice]

More on "Fake News"--A Wide and Personal Context.-Ron Price:
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THE DARKEST HOURS

The English poet Siegfried Sassoon(1886-1967) is famous for his satirical anti-war poetry written during the second decade of the 20th century at a time which, from a Baha’i perspective, could be said to be at the start of the Lesser Peace. He also wrote three volumes of a fictionalized autobiography that were published together in 1937 right at the start of the first teaching Plan of the Baha’i community and just before the start of fake news. In October 1959, the same month and year I became a Baha’i, Sassoon narrowly missed a collision with a turning car. His life had been, according to Daniel Swift, the reviewer of this new book on Sassoon, a catalog of crashes. Sassoon too often stood at the outside of his world, looking in. "I never broke/ Out of my blundering self into the world," Sassoon wrote in 1914 in his late twenties. I “let it all go past me, like a man/ Half asleep in a land that's full of wars." -Ron Price with thanks to Daniel Swift, “A Review of Max Egremont’s Siegfried Sassoon:A Life,” New York Times.com, January 1st 2006.

I never had a practical, mechanical bent
and I’m sure some would have seen me
as a blundering self, seen by others as
half asleep: for I lived in a world of
practical people. By the time I was 60,
I wanted the world to go past me and I
wanted to get-off for I’d had forty years
of people from wall to wall-town to town.

Yes, a catalogue of crashes from that bee
in the windscreen that caused me to write-
off my Volkswagen, to losing my license
four times for speeding...to those crashes
in Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, surely.....
there were no more?......Oh yes---nearly
getting wiped out on a motorbike---was
it three times? And what about all those
other crashes, hospitalizations: from......
Frobisher Bay, Whitby, Scarborough to
Launceston? Sassoon and I had some
things in common, eh Siegfried, eh? eh?

Although I must say, Siggy, that my
Autobiography was not fictionalized.
I tried to call it as straight as I could,
not at the beginning of that teaching
Plan, but down the track 65 years later.
And your life was ending when I was just
getting launched back in ’67 at the start of
this dark heart of the Age of Transition,
the darkest hours before the dawn, that
darkness you had just begun to see.

Ron Price
January 4th 2006

Edited July 9, 2015 by RonPrice