In this essay I will be covering how the media is able to manipulate the populations thoughts about certain events by providing fake news, similar to how Winston works in the ‘Records Department’ in the ‘Ministry of Truth’ which rewrites history according to the party’s needs.

Events in 1984: War propaganda, re-publishing of old events that had ‘outdated’ segments making them ‘true’,

Events in the past: Josef Stalin used/changed/rewrote the media during ww2 in order to control the population – similar to the actions of INGSOC has party members (eg Winston and work colleagues) rewriting the past to promote the parties actions.

Events in present: – Early last November, after Trump’s electoral victory, many rumours and articles went around claiming that many transgender teens had committed suicide in response to the election results.

• Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.
• Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing
• The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided: the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs.
• He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.
• He had committed—would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
• The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past.
• To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.
• The great purges involving thousands of people, with public trials of traitors and thought-criminals who made abject confession of their crimes and were afterwards executed, were special showpieces not occurring oftener than once in a couple of years.
• The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act.
• All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions.
• Desire was thoughtcrime
• In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?
• When once you had succumbed to thoughtcrime it was certain that by a given date you would be dead.