On the 60th anniversary of Orwell's Politics and the English Language, George Orwell described political speech as consisting "largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness." Some six decades later, many symptoms of manipulation and propaganda diagnosed by Orwell persist on the American political landscape, along with new disinformation techniques enabled by modern technology.
Historians, scientists, philosophers, linguists, cognitive experts, journalists, image-makers, and public figures will debate in three separate sessions the current state of political discourse - and journalism's response to it - on the dawn of a bitterly contested presidential campaign- NYPL
Bio
Konstanty Gebert
Konstanty Gebert, a former dissident activist, is a columnist and international reporter for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and a frequent contributor to international media. He was the co-founder of the (unofficial) Jewish Flying University in 1979, and of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews in 1980. In September 1980, he co-founded a white-collar trade union that soon merged with Solidarity, the independent self-governing trade union that precipitated the downfall of Polish Communism. After avoiding internment in the 1981 coup, Gebert became, under the pen name of Dawid Warszawski, a well-known editor and columnist for various underground publications. The author of eight books, he has served as a visiting professor at a number of American universities. He lives in Warsaw.
Masha Gessen
Masha Gessen is an author and a journalist living in Moscow. Her books about Russia are Ester and Ruzya: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace and Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism.
She has written for and worked at many publications in Russia and the United States, including The New Republic, The New York Times, US News and World Report, Bolshoy Gorod, Itogi, and The Moscow Times. She was born in Moscow, emigrated to the United States with her family in 1981, and returned to Moscow as a reporter in the early 1990s. In addition to Russia, she has reported from the Balkans.
Paul Holdengräber
Paul Holdengräber is the Director of LIVE from the NYPL.
Jack Miles
Jack Miles is senior fellow for religious affairs of the Pacific Council on International Policy and Distinguished Professor of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
A former MacArthur fellow, Miles won the Pulitzer Prize for God: A Biography, which has been translated into sixteen languages. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. Miles was a Jesuit seminarian, studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before earning a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages from Harvard.
He is fluent in several modern languages. He serves on the final selection committee of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. A former literary editor and member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board, he is currently general editor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of World Religions.
Orville Schell
Orville Schell was born in New York City in 1940, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and did graduate work at the University of California Berkeley, in Chinese History where he earned a Ph.D.
He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and traveled widely in China.
He is also a contributor to such magazines as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, the China Quarterly, and the New York Review of Books.
Schell has been the recipient of several writing fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center. He is also the winner of numerous awards, including the Harvard/Stanford Shorenstein Award for Asian Journalism, Overseas Press Club of America's Award for the Best Article on a Foreign Subject, a Mencken Award for the Best Feature and a Page One Award for the Best Investigative Story.
The author of fourteen books, nine of them about China, and the contributor to numerous edited volumes, his most recent books are Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangrila from the Himalayas to Hollywood, The China Reader: The Reform Years, and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders.
He has also served as a television commentator for several network news programs, has worked both as correspondent and consultant for a number of PBS and Frontline documentaries and been the correspondent for an Emmy award-winning program for a "60 minutes" segment.
Schell serves on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the Sundance Documentary Fund jury, and the Social Science Research Council. He is also a member of the Pacific Council, the Council on Foreign Relations and a regular participant in the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Schell is the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
He was recently appointed Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York City.
George Soros
George Soros is chair of Soros Fund Management LLC. Born in Budapest, he survived the Nazi occupation and fled Communist Hungary in 1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics.
He then settled in the United States, where he accumulated a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed. An active philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend Cape Town University in apartheid South Africa, Soros has established a network of philanthropic organizations in more than fifty countries. These organizations are dedicated to promoting the values of democracy and an open society. The foundation network spends about $450 million annually.
Soros is the author of nine books, including most recently The Age of Fallibility. His articles and essays on politics, society, and economics regularly appear in major newspapers and magazines around the world. He lives in New York City.
Andras Szanto
Andras Zanto is a writer, researcher, and consultant whose work spans the worlds of art, media, policy, and cultural affairs.
He is a member of the senior faculty of the Sotheby's Institute of Art and director of the NEA Arts Journalism Institute at Columbia University. The former head of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia, he has designed conferences, conducted research, and launched initiatives for major foundations and cultural organizations. He is co-author and editor of five books, and his reporting and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, The Art Newspaper, and other newspapers and periodicals.
He is a founder of the online arts publication Artworldsalon and has edited the journals ARTicles and Reflections. Born in Budapest, he lives in New York City.
Thank you Foratv. Stood out for me, George Soros From Budapest like my father from Buda side of budapest. now George left 1947, I was born Jewish in Vienna, couldn`t leave until 1955-56 I`m Austro-Hungarian and My Parents like George`s Parents are Nazi camp survivors. Communism in Austria was 1945-55, 10 years where everyone had to have a communist party card just to get a job. Hungary the same as Austria, Communist Rule.Austria lucky rid of Communists 1955 but Hungary suffered more.
As for the Jew Hammered on the Roman Pagan Cross and Bach music,WELL,
How many Catholic Priest or Bishops or Pope remind Christians that the Jew on the Cross was A Rabbi taught by the famous Rabban of Jerusalem, RABBAN GAMALIEL. All Rabbis have to be married to get the Rabbinical Papers So Yeshua- Jesus was Married. But see the Denial of the Christian church. Martin Luther 1535 of Protestants Hated JEWS. Historical facts, you can choose your opinions but not your facts. GREAT DEBATE THANKS! I have to agree with Magyar Soros He is as complicated as Rubike`s Cube!
Konstanty Gebert is stunningly honest, with an extremely engaging presentation.
He was a practicing propagandist (like Soros). He is not ashamed of it, as he says, 'propaganda is not just for the bad guys. The good guys can use it, too." His group was so successful that he says, and I paraphrase, "We indoctrinated ourselves to believe we were 'the people'" indicating that Solidarity thought it had the right to speak for all the people, when that may have been a bit presumptuous.
Agreed with these comments. I thought this event would be reflective of American media propaganda, which keeps many otherwise thoughtful Americans fearful and ignorant about the rest of the world. Sadly, it is entirely non reflective. George Orwell would be ashamed to have his name used to justify this event.
Hearing George Soros talk about Orwell and propaganda can make a man's flesh crawl. However Soros does not represent himself very badly in this video. His baby, Mediamatters does appear as though organized under a cloud of mental perversion.
But he appears amoral, rather than a sociopath. Mentioning his personal conflict with Bush removes his actions in the media from a plan or solution, it's more of a clash of egoes. He is not a master of propaganda. Which raises the question. Why is he on this discussion panel?
Further, Russia had more of a claim to the propaganda than did the U.S. Following Russia's 1917 Revolution, the U.S., in consort with several other western countries, invaded Russia in 1918. The Russians never forgot this event. Thousands were killed, raped, and tortured by the members of the coalition. Kruschev made mention of it in his visit to the U.N. in the late 50s. The invasion was the first volley of the idea of the "Great Communist Conspiracy" and the beginning of communist paranoia in the West. It was also the beginning of paranoia about about the West in Russia.
American government propaganda is identical to that of the Soviet model. There is no difference between Vladimir Putin telling Russians that the West is the great threat to Russian Society, requiring a massive military buildup and Americans saying the same thing about Russia all throughout the Cold War. Both use fear as a control.
member. 
