Language, Media and Truth – how narratives, platforms and power shape what we believe

From propaganda to press freedom, from Orwellian doublespeak to algorithmic misinformation – how the battle for truth is fought through language and media

Language, Media and Truth is where Pen vs Sword examines the struggle over meaning in a world saturated by narratives, platforms and competing claims to authority. Language is not a neutral medium. It is a system of choices and it’s about what to name, what to describe, what to leave unnamed and undescribed and those choices carry political consequences. The words used to describe a military operation, a protest, a refugee, a criminal, an enemy: all of these shape how the events and people in question are understood, and therefore how they are treated.

Media is the infrastructure through which language does its political work at scale. Who controls the platforms on which information circulates? Who owns the newspapers, who runs the television stations, who designs the algorithms? The answer shapes what information reaches what audiences, in what form, with what framing.

Truth is what this infrastructure is, at its best, supposed to convey, and what it too often serves to conceal, distort or manufacture. The battle for truth is not simply a battle between facts and falsehoods. It is a battle about who has the authority to establish what counts as a fact, who has the platform to challenge established narratives, and what happens to those who persist in telling uncomfortable truths.

The articles gathered here examine all of these questions, through profiles of individual journalists and truth-tellers, through analysis of specific moments when media and power collided, and through broader accounts of how propaganda, censorship and the control of narrative have shaped the modern world.

The politics of language – how words shape reality

George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language remains one of the most important texts ever written about the relationship between language and power. Its central argument is simple: that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful, murder respectable, and give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. The debasement of language — its replacement with euphemism, jargon and abstraction — serves the interests of those who wish to conceal what is actually being done

The essay was written in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. But its insights apply equally to the language of contemporary politics: “enhanced interrogation” for torture, “collateral damage” for civilian deaths, “regime change” for the violent overthrow of governments. The vocabulary of power is a vocabulary of concealment. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World explored a parallel and in some ways more insidious mechanism: the replacement of truthful language not with lies but with pleasurable distraction — soma for the mind, administered at scale.

The conditioning of thought through language is also the subject of our account of B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism and shows how the control of reinforcement schedules shapes what we think we want, and therefore what we say. The relationship between language, behaviour and power is deeper than propaganda alone.

The history of propaganda – from wartime posters to social media

Propaganda – the deliberate use of media to shape public opinion in the service of political goals – reached its systematic, industrial form in the twentieth century, when mass literacy, radio, cinema and later television made it possible to reach entire populations simultaneously with coordinated messages. The First World War propaganda machines were the laboratories in which modern techniques of mass persuasion were developed.

The Cold War produced a more sophisticated form: propaganda that did not present itself as propaganda. The invisible management of media coverage, which is to say, the normalisation of empire’s actions through careful framing and is the subject of our account of Shock and Awe: how the doctrine of overwhelming force was designed as much for domestic media consumption as for military effect.

The architecture of power that sustains this system whether it’s empire, money, and stories is analysed directly in our piece on how empires, media and stories rule the world. Read it alongside our account of social media’s double edge and see how the same platforms used for activism are simultaneously instruments of surveillance and behavioural manipulation.

Press freedom and its enemies – journalists who paid the price

A free press is the mechanism by which citizens in a democracy can know what their governments are doing in their name. The case of Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks publications exposed war crimes and classified military information, and who spent more than a decade in effective imprisonment as a result is the defining press freedom case of the twenty-first century. It raises questions that go to the heart of what journalism is: is publishing evidence of war crimes journalism or espionage?

Robert Fisk spent four decades reporting from the Middle East with a commitment to telling what he found, regardless of whether it matched official narratives. His account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre was the first eyewitness report of an atrocity that the perpetrators initially denied. His career is one of the clearest examples of what press freedom looks like in practice and what defending it costs.

John Pilger, who died in 2023, spent six decades documenting what powerful states do to people who have no power to resist. Ian Hislop has edited Private Eye for four decades, and reputedly sued more times than any other person in British legal history, and continued regardless. Both represent the tradition of adversarial journalism that treats accountability as a professional duty rather than an editorial risk.

Ece Temelkuran was fired from her newspaper column in Turkey for political dissent and forced into exile where she has written the most urgent account of what happens to press freedom when democratic norms erode. John Simpson‘s five decades of BBC foreign reporting represent a different model: the institutional journalist who accumulates enough knowledge and enough authority to challenge official narratives from within.

On the ground, Paul Conroy, photojournalist, survivor of the siege of Homs, and witness to some of the twenty-first century’s worst atrocities represents the irreplaceable human cost of frontline reporting. And Matt Kennard (formerly of Declassified UK) represents the document-based investigative tradition: exposing the covert activities of the British state through painstaking research rather than frontline access.

The digital information landscape – algorithms, echo chambers and truth

The transformation of the information landscape by digital technology has been so rapid and so total that it is still difficult to see clearly what has happened. The gatekeeping function (that was once performed imperfectly, partially, sometimes corruptly), by editors, journalists and broadcasters has been transferred, at scale, to algorithms. And algorithms, unlike editors, have no professional commitment to accuracy, no legal liability for defamation, and no interest in truth beyond its capacity to generate engagement.

Information that is emotionally arousing outrage, fear or disgust generates more engagement than information that is accurate, nuanced or complex. Platforms optimised for engagement therefore systematically amplify emotional information over accurate information. This is not a conspiracy. It is the predictable consequence of applying commercial logic to the infrastructure of public knowledge.

Echo chambers are environments in which people encounter primarily information that confirms their existing beliefs are partly a product of this architecture. They are also partly a product of human psychology: confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and believe information that fits our existing worldview, is a feature of human cognition that predates the internet. The digital architecture does not create it. But it exploits it with a precision and at a scale that is historically unprecedented.

Social media, censorship and the new public square

The question of who controls what can be said in the digital public square is one of the most important political questions of the present moment. The case documented in Pixels of Protest of how a political artwork about Palestine was censored by Meta halfway through an advertising campaign, illustrates the stakes with uncomfortable precision. The question was not simply whether Meta had the legal right. It was what the removal revealed about how private companies, operating behind opaque algorithmic systems, make decisions that affect the visibility of political speech.

Understanding these systems – their commercial logic, their political consequences, their relationship to the broader history of censorship – is part of what Language, Media & Truth is about. The articles on this page are exercises in that understanding: attempts to see, behind the apparently neutral operations of platforms and algorithms, the political choices and power relations that shape what we know and how we know it.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Understanding how language and media operate is not a separate inquiry from the other questions this magazine asks. It is the condition of possibility for all of them. You cannot understand how art challenges power without understanding how official culture manages and censors the images that challenge it. You cannot understand resistance and solidarity without understanding the media environments in which movements either become visible or are suppressed.

You cannot understand how capital shapes culture without understanding the ownership structures that determine what gets published, broadcast and amplified. And you cannot think seriously about future imaginaries without asking who controls the stories about what is and isn’t possible, and by what means those stories are made to seem like facts. The battle for truth runs through everything on this site. That is precisely why it has its own hub.

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