Orwell Rolls in His Grave
Director: Robert Kane Pappas
SAG Harbor-Basement Pictures
103 minutes

On May 27, 2004, 65 million people picked-up their telephones within the span of one-hour and called into the American Idol television show. Of those 65 million people, how many thought about the direct, overt conditioning that is being thrust upon them by the mainstream media? How many realized that if the networks, advertisers, and talk radio hosts hyped it enough, they’d call into a show and vote on which monkey did the best back-flips on a trampoline. It’s true, and if the media played their cards right they’d have people arguing about it the next day if their favorite monkey didn’t win!

But of all these people, how many would take the time to ponder this quote by George Orwell in 1984: “They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality … and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.”

This chilling passage lays the framework for Robert Kane Pappas’ remarkable documentary, Orwell Rolls in His Grave, an expose which hits as hard as anything that’s been released since Kristina Borjesson’s Into the Buzzsaw. The reason why its impact is so dramatic can be found in the fact that it covers what could quite possibly be the # 1 news story in our country right now – how everyday American citizens have been all but been forgotten by our supposed watchdog that “operates exclusively in the interest of a handful of corporations who decide what American people should know, and more importantly, what they should not know” (Zopap Entertainment press release).

The result, of course, is that, according to Danny Schechter (co-founder of Globalvision and former ABC & CNN producer), “We falsely think of our country as a democracy, when in fact it has evolved into a mediaocracy.” Such a scenario hearkens back to the protagonist of Orwell’s novel 1984, Winston Smith, a man who worked for the Ministry of Truth not to preserve history or facts, but to alter past news stories so that the ruling party’s lies could become true. Some people may object that we haven’t yet reached such deplorable depths in this country, but when we leaf through our history books and find that Lee Harvey Oswald is still listed as JFK’s ‘lone nut assassin’ and that FDR had no foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attacks, we have to wonder.

In this light, Pappas shows how the financial and political elite have become one-in-the-same, and how this duopoly has developed a pattern in determining what stories are reported, which ones are ignored, and how the overall information relayed to us is manipulated to further their aims. Media historian Robert McChesney tells us that we’ve become a de-politicized, frighteningly weak democracy with too few voters who aren’t informed enough on vital issues. In fact, only half a dozen corporations now control literally everything we see, read, and hear. This means that the mainstream media is nothing more than a subsidiary of Corporate America; and news is not reported, but managed. In what is supposed to be a self-governing society, our supposed ‘watchdog’ has become so pacified and cowardly that their bark (in terms of protecting us) is feebler than that of a sickly chihuahua.

The greatest strength in Pappas’ filmmaking, though, rests in his ability to show how certain issues are talked about in our mainstream media, while others simply are not. It’s similar to the Soviet Union of old, where the system of Communism was off-limits. Likewise, in the Pravda/Tass of U.S. journalism, the system of Corporate America is off-limits. Thus, we have erected around us a barbed-wire framework of thought, outside of which our media is not allowed to report. To reinforce this notion, huge amounts of money and time are spent trying to convince the public that Corporate America’s interests are the same as our interests. To do so, the media must perpetuate a myth that our society is based upon competition, while at the very same time knowing full-well that those at the top of the control pyramid are doing everything in their power to crush competition. By doing so, they can prevent those who are telling the truth from entering their exclusive clique on a level playing field. The primary enforcers of this phenomenon are what we call Gatekeepers: lackey editors, spin masters, phony baloney pundits, and outright propagandists.

With that said, Pappas asks, “Could a media system, controlled by a few global corporations with the ability to overwhelm all competing voices, be able to turn lies into truth?” An answer can be found in a review of this documentary by Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere: “News media companies aren’t as interested in exposing facts or keeping an eye on political corruption as much as perpetrating their own power as the shapers of a kind of dozing, status-quo, no-rough-edges view of the way things work, while scrupulously avoiding hard truths.”

What this ultimately gives us is a sameness and lack of diversity in our news that is reminiscent of what Nazi mind-twister Joseph Goebbels uttered: “What you want in a media system is to present an ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity.” Are you listening CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS? Of course they are, but as long as the American public keeps letting them get away with it (the 65 million callers for American Idol), they won’t feel compelled to change. Rather, they’ll keep vying for more prominence and stature, as can be seen from this remark by the Center for Public Integrity’s Charles Lewis: “They [the media] control whether or not a politician gets his mug on the tube, and that’s power. That’s the ultimate power in a political realm --- controlling perceptions!”

All of the above observations have been of a general, big picture variety, but Pappas does delve into specifics in his film, such as:

- How those with the top 1% of wealth in this country have two parties to do their bidding for them (the   Democrats and Republicans), while the other 99% have no political party representing them.
- FCC Chairman Michael Powell’s utter nepotistic disregard for our best interests.
- Congress’s incumbency return rate versus that of Russia’s politburo (the results will shock you).
- Political advertising as a huge cash cow for the media.
- The Carlyle Group, 9-11 and the Saudi/bin Laden getaway, plus Israel’s role in the Reagan-Bush October   Surprise.
- Lee Hamilton’s role as a cover-up artist (he now sits on the 9-11 cover-up committee).
- Deregulation in the Reagan/Clinton eras that opened the door for Clear Channel, Ruppert Murdoch, etc.
- Threats against future Internet freedoms.
- Plus Jack Welch, Fox News, and the 2000 election.

Of course there’s more, but to close, we must once again return to George Orwell, for as Robert Kane Pappas’ film shows us, we are reaching a point where words and concepts that make real thought possible are being eliminated by our mind-numbing corporate media; replaced by a polarization of opinion where all that remains is good versus evil (i.e. you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists).

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