The Media’s Memory-Hole Privilege

I n the dystopian novel 1984, our protagonist Winston Smith gets the order to rewrite an article that showed Big Brother had commended a person who was now in the Party’s disfavor: “reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.” For Winston in Airstrip One, that means actually burning the record of the Times newspaper in the fiery furnace of the memory hole, and producing a forgery of the past. Smith was daily saving the honor of the unchallengeable ruler: Big Brother.

With the Internet, there is no paper trail to burn. There is just code to update. And this has presented a kind of fait accompli for journalistic ethics. The past used to be there in embarrassing paper — eventually turning yellow and converted into microfiche. Journalistic errors existed, and were acknowledged. The disposability of the medium made the mistakes less embarrassing overall, and the archivability of the medium made the public record easier to determine.

But the Internet makes your past mistakes present. And that’s unbearable. On February 17, 2020, the Washington Post ran a story headlined “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.” Recently the headline and some of the text have been changed to say that the senator from Arkansas keeps repeating a coronavirus “fringe theory that scientists have disputed.” The memory of the original headline is half-embedded in the URL, which still has the word “conspiracy.”

Basically, the incoming Biden administration has authorized an investigation into the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origins. Facebook has subsequently stopped memory-holing posts suggesting that COVID-19 may have an origin in a lab. And the Washington Post is saving the honor of our unchallengeable ruler, which is not Joe Biden.

No, in 2021, our ruler is the illusion of an infallible expert “consensus,” which is mediated to a supposedly raging and stupid American public by self-described clever and public-spirited journalists, and then hopefully (in their view) encoded into the algorithms of social media. Having learned his lesson about 2016 the hard way — by suffering the disapproval of Barack Obama and his own woke workforce — Mark Zuckerberg is now tasked with the work that Jesus put off until the General Judgment at the end of the world, dividing us all into sheep and goats.

Weirdly, the word “conspiracy” that was applied to Tom Cotton’s mostly reasonable speculations is better applied to the behavior of the institutions that tarred him with the word. They are the ones abusing their authority and the public trust deposited in their institutions for their own personal ends. That’s a pretty good working definition for a conspiracy.

The worldview of liberalism is that there is a critical mass of benighted and dangerous people who believe “disinformation” that has been implanted in their brainstem by vicious religious ideologues, homophobic Russian gangsters, or awkward conservative uncles who remained unslaughtered by their clever nieces last Thanksgiving. The Big Brotherhood of national media outlets announces the expert consensus, and using the powers of social conformism on social media and just social censorship by social-media companies, the Ministry of Truth can help the smooth governing of the people toward their inevitable destinies out of the backward past and into the utopia where the arc of history finally lands like a rainbow terminating into a pot of gold.

Your life mistakes, like responding with your genuine thoughts to Google’s solicitation for comment on internal woke religion, or being crowned Queen of Love at some crackers Veiled Prophet’s dinner dance, will be ruthlessly unearthed by the media to make an example of you in the present. The media’s “mistakes” will be gently erased and amended, hopefully without anyone noticing at all.

And this is the important part: Both actions — the media dumping buckets of your past crap all over your face, and covering its own ass without remorse — are the same exact thing: They are the assertion of power for the benefit of the ruled. Your livelihood being destroyed, and a journalist’s racket protecting him from criticism, are both actions of great benevolence done for the general moral improvement. So, shut up.

At least the Washington Post attached a kind of note acknowledging the problem. That’s better than the New York Times, which on July 12, 2020, published a story about a young man, a COVID-skeptic, in Texas who died at a “COVID party” and admitted just before a death he couldn’t comprehend that he had viewed the virus as a hoax. As we at National Review and other outlets began pointing out the holes in this story, which wasn’t bylined from Texas, the story was edited without notes at all. Now, instead, it was changed to a story about how Dr. Jane Appleby of Methodist Hospital had told this account but that the Times couldn’t independently confirm it. The story was substantially altered on July 13, July 14, and July 17 to reflect an ever-more-skeptical tone. But the only indication of change on the link today just says, “Updated Nov. 23, 2020.”

That’s the digital future. Individuals will be held accountable for all their sins, while the ruling institutions will just print notices about “updates” that serve as vague reminders that they, unlike you, have a license to be wrong, precisely because you have a duty to believe them, and they have the right to be believed.

You just hope that some days, like the commissars getting ready to send the Molotov–Ribbentrop compact down the line to the Comintern, they feel a bit embarrassed when the update is made.