The White House puts Orwell to shame
British journalist Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, in 1946 bemoaned the corruption of words by politicians. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible,” he wrote in the essay “Politics and the English Language.”
Discussing totalitarian outrages ranging from the British rule of India to Russian purges and deportations, he argued that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Blair, who as Orwell invented Newspeak – a language that served the purposes of a tyrannical regime in “1984” – added: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”
Should Karoline Leavitt, press secretary to President Donald J. Trump, know better?
Blair’s insights come to mind when one considers how Leavitt, a former Fox News intern and failed Congressional candidate, speaks. As she moved to limit media access to her boss, Leavitt justified her actions with phrases that would send the long-dead British reporter into full spin cycle in his grave.
Leavitt recently announced that the White House is now taking on the right to appoint the reporters who get access to the president in small gatherings, the so-called press pool. That choice has long been the privilege of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
The WHCA “should no longer have a monopoly” on organizing such pools, Leavitt said. Instead, the White House will make those selections.
No monopoly there, right? No Orwellian language there, right?
As Politico reported, the pool is a group of 13 journalists who attend sessions in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One and other venues too small for the full press corps. Usually including reporters from such outfits as CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, ABC News, Fox News and The New York Times, the pool shares information from the meetings with the larger group of White House reporters.
Speaking far more plainly than Leavitt has, WHCA president Eugene Daniels, a Politico reporter, condemned the White House usurpation.
“This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States. It suggests the government will choose the journalists who cover the president. In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps,” Daniels said. “Since its founding in 1914, the WHCA has sought to ensure that the reporters, photographers, producers and technicians who actually do the work – 365 days of every year – decide amongst themselves how these rotations are operated, so as to ensure consistent professional standards and fairness in access on behalf of all readers, viewers and listeners.”
Similarly, a spokesman for The New York Times lambasted the change. “The White House’s move to handpick favored reporters to observe the president — and exclude anyone whose coverage the administration may not like — is an effort to undermine the public’s access to independent, trustworthy information about the most powerful person in America,” the spokesman said.
The three major wire services also weighed in. “It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press,” the top executives at The Associated Press, Reuters and Bloomberg said in a joint statement. “We believe that any steps by the government to limit the number of wire services with access to the President threatens that principle. It also harms the spread of reliable information to people, communities, businesses and global financial markets that heavily depend on our reporting.”
For her part, Leavitt couched the White House’s journalistic power grab in further Orwellian language. “All journalists, outlets and voices deserve a seat at this highly coveted table,” she said.
For now, however, that “all journalists” group, excludes AP, which supplies thousands of news outlets worldwide with information.
Recall that Trump barred AP from the Oval Office, miffed that it refuses to acquiesce to his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Of course, that usage change itself smacks of Newspeak, since the gulf has been known by the Mexican term since at least the late 16th century, well before the U.S. or Mexico existed. “Mexico” derives from the Aztec language.
In Trump’s coinage for the gulf, one hears the sounds of infamous diktats by usurpers of various sorts, echoes that would similarly infuriate Orwell. Consider the Bolsheviks 1924 move renaming Saint Petersburg as Leningrad. (The earlier name was restored by public referendum in 1991.) Trump’s new usage also seem redolent of “Oceania,” the “1984” state that included both North and South America.
AP has sued over its expulsion from the pool. The judge in that case has warned the White House that the law isn’t on its side in that case and slated a hearing for March 20.
Leavitt said the White House plans to stock the pool with reporters that she argued are “who are well suited to cover the news of the day.” She said the group would include “new media” outlets — such as digital sites, streaming services and podcast, adding “Legacy media outlets who have been here for years will still participate in the pool, but new voices are going to be welcomed in as well.”
To critics, those “new voices” seem to mean Trump-friendly outlets. Among them are Sage Steele, a former ESPN broadcaster-turned-podcast host who has filled a “new media seat” in the White House briefing room. Steele, who publicly backed Trump, is a big fan of Tulsi Gabbard, the former cultist recently appointed as Director of National Intelligence, and of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine-averse head of the Department of Health and Human Services.
The WHCA president pushed back on Leavitt’s implication that the association limits new voices. “For generations, the working journalists elected to lead the White House Correspondents’ Association board have consistently expanded the WHCA’s membership and its pool rotations to facilitate the inclusion of new and emerging outlets,” Daniel said.
But, in a remarkable fillip, Leavitt argued that “by deciding which outlets make up the limited press pool on a day-to-day basis, the White House will be restoring power back to the American people.”
That tortured claim irked even a correspondent for Trump-friendly Fox. Jacqui Heinrich, a Fox senior White House correspondent, wrote on X: “This move does not give the power back to the people — it gives power to the White House.” Heinrich is a board member of the correspondents’ association.
Remember that Leavitt, known for flaunting a crucifix like a weapon in her press briefings, previously distinguished herself by telling Sean Hannity that “President Trump campaigned alongside Elon Musk, and President Trump promised voters on the campaign that he was going to make our government more efficiency [sic].” One commenter on X noted “that’s unpossible.” Another noted: “Make English Great Again.”
When asked about how long it might take for Trump to lower prices, this Kewpie doll — at 27, the youngest person ever to be named press secretary — sought clarification of the question, saying, “Prices at the store and at the grocery pump?”
More substantially, Leavitt appears to have lied — directly or by omission — in August 2024 in saying that “Project 2025 has nothing to do with our campaign,” despite her involvement with that conservative policy blueprint. Leavitt contributed to the project’s “Conservative Governance 101” training program and appeared in a training video titled “The Art of Professionalism.” In the video, she discussed her work in the White House during Trump’s first term and offered guidance to potential future administration members. As WCTU, a Cleveland broadcast station noted, Leavitt concluded her remarks by encouraging trainees, stating, “So best of luck, and if you need us as a resource, we are here to help.”
Trump denied connections to the infamous Heritage Foundation project, but he has implemented many of its recommendations. As journalists at Politico have reported, these including moves Trump has taken on immigration, government staffing, energy, foreign affairs, the economy and social issues such as ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs, using the Civil Rights Act to remove gender ideology and critical race theory from schools, and narrowing gender identity.
Of course, a Washington flack lying isn’t all that surprising, especially in light of who she works for. But what’s more disturbing is that Trump’s moves against the media are having a profound effect beyond the briefing room.
The most recent blow came at The Washington Post, where opinion page editor David Shipley quit after the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, issued a directive putting his heavy hand on that page. Bezos mandated that the paper’s editorial page would now advocate “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on such topics.
As The New York Times reported, The Post has published a wide variety of views from the left and the right, including such liberal champions as David Ignatius and Ruth Marcus, along with such conservative voices as George Will and Charles Krauthammer. As the Times noted, “The new direction envisioned for The Post’s opinion section appears to be a rightward shift for the paper.”
Margaret Sullivan, the former Post media columnist, was far less measured in her judgment of Bezos’s efforts at the paper.
“Especially in the light of the billionaire’s other blatant efforts to cozy up to Donald Trump, Bezos’s move is more than a gut punch; it’s more like a death knell for the once-great news organization he bought in 2013,” Sullivan wrote in The Guardian.
“It’s unclear what will happen to such excellent left-of-center columnists as Catherine Rampell, Eugene Robinson and EJ Dionne. And it’s unclear to what extent this ruling eventually will affect the paper’s hard-news coverage, which so far has been unbowed in covering the chaotic rollout of the new Trump administration,” she wrote. “What is clear is that Bezos no longer wants to own an independent news organization. He wants a megaphone and a political tool that will benefit his own commercial interests.”
In an email to her, former Post executive editor Martin Baron told her, “What Bezos is doing today runs counter to what he said, and actually practiced, during my tenure at the Post.” Baron added: “I have always been grateful for how he stood up for the Post and an independent press against Trump’s constant threats to his business interest. Now, I couldn’t be more sad and disgusted.”
This is hardly the first instance of Bezos genuflecting to Trump in ways that have dented the newspaper’s reputation. As Sullivan noted, the Post lost some 300,000 subscribers just before the November election after Bezos blocked an editorial endorsement of Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris. And, more recently, the paper refused to publish Ann Telnaes’s cartoon that showed American oligarchs, including Bezos, bowing to Trump; in protest, Telnaes — like Shipley — resigned.
To be clear, Trump can wield a big club with Bezos. Let’s remember that in 2018, he threatened to punish Bezos’s Amazon possibly by changing its tax treatment. Trump was weary of criticisms in The Washington Post — criticisms that, at least on the editorial page, may suddenly become more muted.
There’s no Orwellian doublespeak in the comments of Bezos’s critics, though his “liberties” and “markets” comment may well prove to be such. Does anyone hear echoes there of Orwell’s “sheer cloudy vagueness?”