How the BBC Became Orwell’s Nightmare

The institution Orwell fled has become the thing he warned us about.

George Orwell worked at the BBC’s Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943, producing wartime propaganda broadcasts for the Indian subcontinent. He hated the bureaucracy and euphemisms, the way language bent around power. He left in 1943, disillusioned, and channelled the experience directly into Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of civilisation’s best guides to totalitarian thinking.

Orwell’s prescience is famous, of course. And while “Orwellian” has become a cliche in today’s political discourse, it aptly describes the strange fall of the BBC from a once universally admired institution to one warped by groupthink and ideological capture.

Orwell observed that institutions don’t usually distort reality out of malice, but out of certainty. Good people often persuade themselves that manipulation serves the truth, that narrative coherence overrides the obligation to report what actually happened.

In his essay Looking Back on the Spanish War, Orwell writes:

“I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed… and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.”

Later in the same essay, he says:

“This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”

Eighty years on, the BBC has become the thing Orwell feared.