Unbelievable Stupidities

In April 1944, in one of his early Tribune columns, George Orwell described the feeling of coming across a newspaper from before the outbreak of World War II, which at the time had been raging for almost five years, and “marvelling at its almost unbelievable stupidity.”

The stupidity that Orwell saw was a naive disregard—or in some cases a willful downplaying—of the danger signs of the coming global war. Instead of charting the political volatility, the mass unemployment, the march of dictators, and the atrocities that were already unfolding, he wrote, some newspapers portrayed the world as “a cozy place” of celebrity, crime, beauty-culture, sport, and animal stories. Analyzing a copy of the Daily Mail from January 1936, he finds no mention of Hitler, or the Depression, or the impending civil war in Spain, and it takes until page twenty-six for an article—with grim echoes of today—about Mussolini’s pledge that Italian air strikes on the Red Cross would stop going forward.

In other words, for Orwell the press had disastrously failed to rise to the moment.

I was revisiting some of Orwell’s early columns as I prepared to take over, alongside Aida Alami, writing this newsletter on Mondays. And this passage got me thinking: Ten years from now, or eighty years from now, what might future observers look back on as the media’s “unbelievable stupidities”? Will they think the press of today rose to the moment?