Meticulously tracing the process by which media has distorted and often dismissed actual news events, Pappas presents a riveting and eloquent mix of media professionals and leading intellectual voices on the media.
Among the cast of characters in "Orwell Rolls Over In His Grave" are Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Integrity, Vincent Bugliosi, former L.A. prosecutor and legal scholar, film director and author Michael Moore, Rep. Bernie Sanders, Danny Schecter, author and former producer for ABC and CNN, and Tony Benn, former member of the British Parliament.
"Orwell Rolls Over In His Grave" expresses ideas that will never be heard in mainstream media. From Globalvision?s Danny Schecter: ?We falsely think of our country as a democracy when it has evolved into a `mediacracy', where a media that is supposed to check political abuse is part of the political abuse. New York University media professor Mark Crispin Miller says, These commercial entities now vie with the government for control over our lives. They are not a healthy counterweight to government.
Joseph Goebbels, former head of Nazi propaganda, said that what you want in a media system- he meant the Nazi media system - is to present the ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity. From the very size of the media monopolies and how they got that way to who decides what gets on the air and what doesn't, "Orwell Rolls Over In His Grave" moves through a troubling list of questions and news stories that go unanswered and unreported in the mainstream media.
Are Americans being given the information a democracy needs to survive or have they been electronically lobotomized? Has the frenzy for media consolidation led to a dangerous irony where in an era of more news sources the majority of the population has actually become less informed? Orwell Rolls Over In His Grave reminds us that 1984 is no longer a date in the future.
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