Carl Bernstein (of Watergate fame) writes open letter to Guardian editor, in support

[BelgianMadCow]

9. Good catch. I just reread Orwell's 1984 (not an instruction manual)

and didn't remember that quote, so I went Ixquicking, and..

Orwell tried to promote the use of more precise language in political discourse, and he criticised political language popular at the time, such as "running-dog lackey" and "Fascist octopus", which he said prevented thought. It seems unlikely that Orwell would have approved of many of the uses to which his pseudonym is applied. The loose definition of the term and the often poor correlation between the real-life situations people describe as Orwellian and his own dystopian fiction leave the use of the adjective at best inexact and frequently politically inaccurate. In his essay "Politics and the English Language", Orwell derided the use of cliché and dying metaphors, which "even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent" and went on to say "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."

You actually have a very good and broad point. If we would redo all the M$M, cleansing it of newspeak, we'd get very interesting news. I read a lengthy analysis of the use of the phrase "giving oxygen to the economy". Newspeak for giving more profits to big corps. Here, it's used all the time as synonym for tax breaks for corporations. Very useful. These days, we need to challenge every word.