George Orwell

Orwell and the BBC

During World War II, Orwell worked for the BBC as a talks producer. However, his time at the BBC was marked by frustration, as he found himself at odds with the bureaucracy and the limitations on free expression. His experiences influenced his later writings on propaganda, particularly in his essay "Politics and the English Language."

At present I’m just an orange that’s been trodden on by a very dirty boot.” “[The BBC’s] atmosphere is something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless.” “I have left the BBC after two wasted years in it.” Thus, in letters and diaries, George Orwell described his two years of broadcasting to India for the wartime BBC. As he wrote in his diary: ​“one rapidly becomes propaganda-minded and develops a cunning one did not previously have.” For example: ​“I am regularly alleging in all my newsletters that the Japanese are plotting the attack Russia,” but “I don’t believe this to be so.” Iin the same diary entry: ​“All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.” The BBC was subject to strict censorship policies and Orwell hated it.

Orwell faced challenges with the restrictions imposed by the government on what could be broadcast. His frustration with the limitations on free expression and the necessity of adhering to official lines of communication is evident in his writings. The idea of censorship, conformity, and the suppression of dissent is a central theme in "1984." In the novel, the government, led by the Party and its leader Big Brother, exercises extreme control over information and individual thought. The concept of Room 101, where individuals face their worst fears, is used as a tool of psychological manipulation and control. Room 101 was a meeting room at BBC and was located underground. Later he would say about BBC that for him it was a waste of time, and that the BBC was 'something half way between a girl's school and a lunatic asylum. While Orwell's experiences at the BBC influenced his later works and his perspective on propaganda, Orwell's concerns about censorship and the manipulation of information, however, are reflected in both his diaries, essays and his dystopian fiction.

In his essay Freedom of The Press Orwell writes: "The British press is extremely centralised, 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".

It is a mistake to think that Orwell criticized mostly totalitarianism; Orwell warns also against liberals who want to defend democracy with means of censorship and oppression of freedom of speech. He wrote "One of the peculiar phenomena of our time is the renegade Liberal. Over and above the familiar Marxist claim that ‘bourgeois liberty’ is an illusion, there is now a widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought."