The Ministry of Truth — Minitrue, in Newspeak — was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

George Orwell, 1984

 

Truth is unalterable, eternal, and unambiguous. It can be unrecognized, but it cannot be changed. It applies to everything that God created, and only what He created is real. It is beyond learning because it is beyond time and process. It has no opposite, no beginning, and no end. It merely is.

A Course in Miracles

Daily Kos’ Meteor Blades has a great post about Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Dow-Jones (publisher of the Wall Street Journal) and what it means, centering on Keith Olbermann’s recent interview with the perceptive Rachel Maddow. A small excerpt:

KO: And the Daily Kos today reminded its readers of a lawsuit that had been filed by two employees against a Fox News station in the Tampa area in 2003. They had been fired by the station – this is opposed to the national network – for refusing to distort a story, they said. And Fox News actually argued in the appeal that broadcasters have the First Amendment right to lie or deliberately distort news reports on the public airwaves, and Fox News – Fox Corporation anyway – won, although on slightly narrower grounds than that. First Amendment protections are strong, but Fox is brash enough to claim we can lie and the Constitution says we can lie?

RM: This is getting, I think, to the really big issue here, the really big story. Because this is not just about media consolidation. It’s not just about supporting Republican candidates or conservative policies. The big issue here is, and the big agenda here, I think, is to just make news worse. To undermine the idea of a discoverable truth about information that can be researched, and conveyed and believed in. When you bill the work of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly as news, when you call that the Fox News channel, you’re degrading the very idea of news. You’re making news something that should be questioned alongside propaganda or opinion. You’re putting the very idea of news in the gutter where it lives with equal stature to propaganda. It simply undermines the very idea of journalism as something that deserves respect. It gets us very much back to the Bush Administration’s assertions about the reality-based community being something that should be questioned by people who live outside that reality-based community. That’s the big agenda here, undermining the whole idea of journalism, and that’s the real thing to worry about.

KO: The good old Ministry of Truth has another outlet …

Update: Edwards Urges Dems to Fight Dow Jones Sale.