Fighting fake news: exploring George Orwell's relationship to information literacy

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to analyse George Orwell's diaries through an information literacy lens. Orwell is well known for his dedication to freedom of speech and objective truth, and his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is often used as a lens through which to view the fake news phenomenon. This paper will examine Orwell's diaries in relation to UNESCO's Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy to examine how information literacy concepts can be traced in historical documents.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper will use a content analysis method to explore Orwell's relationship to information literacy. Two of Orwell's political diaries from the period 1940–42 were coded for key themes related to the ways in which Orwell discusses and evaluates information and news. These themes were then compared to UNESCO Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy. Textual analysis software NVivo 12 was used to perform keyword searches and word frequency queries in the digitised diaries.

Findings

The findings show that while Orwell's diaries and the Five Laws did not share terminology, they did share ideas on bias and access to information. They also extend the history of information literacy research and practice by illustrating how concerns about the need to evaluate information sources are represented within historical literature.

Originality/value

This paper combines historical research with textual analysis to bring a unique historical perspective to information literacy, demonstrating that “fake news” is not a recent phenomenon, and that the tools to fight it may also lie in historical research.

Citation

Haggar, E. (2020), "Fighting fake news: exploring George Orwell's relationship to information literacy", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 76 No. 5, pp. 961-979. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2019-0223