Translating 8 of the Media's Code Words to Reveal Their Imperial Mindset

The corporate media uses its own private dictionary to casually launder tragedy and hostility toward outsiders.

"If thought corrupts language," George Orwell once reasoned, "language can also corrupt thought." This is how the immoral can seem banal, the cruel sanitized and the trite profound. In his time these nuggets of discourse included, "bestial atrocities," "iron heel," "bloodstained tyranny," and "free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder."

Today these terms seem corny, foreign or both, but in the late 1940s they passed for insight and conventional wisdom, and one had to more or less parrot them in order to be taken seriously. Orwell lamented the hollowness of these human propaganda conduits, which we generally call “pundits”:

One often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being [say these terms] but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.

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