The Guardian ran a story Wednesday featuring an obviously fake quote from George Orwell’s famous book 1984 that purported to presage the supposed “post-fact” era of President Donald Trump.
The Twitter account Pixelated Boat posted Jan. 23 what appeared to be an excerpt from 1984 that displayed a back-and-forth dialogue between Winston, the central character of the story, and “Big Brother.”
Chilling. This passage from Orwell’s 1984 perfectly predicted the Trump era: pic.twitter.com/869PtRSRUW
— Pixelated Boat (@pixelatedboat) January 24, 2017
But the problem, of course, is that the quote was completely made-up, and much to Pixelated Boat’s surprise, The Guardian’s Brigid Delaney decided to nevertheless run with it in a story Jan. 25, likely thinking the quote was perfectly genuine, with the express purpose of taking a swipe at President Donald Trump.
Holy shit. This made it into this (now corrected) Guardian article: https://t.co/3NLDnLTA63 (Hat tip to @LorneFranks who screencapped it) pic.twitter.com/Gbh6q4MOwC
— Pixelated Boat (@pixelatedboat) January 25, 2017
The above screenshot shows two pictures of the Guardian article: one before the paper corrected the piece and one after.
Brigid Delaney, writer of the article, said that 2017 belongs to Orwell and noted that sales of the book increased on Amazon, following the inauguration of President Donald Trump and the emergence of the phrase “alternative facts.”
Delaney also saw fit to point out that 1984 was “published under the shadow of fascism in 1949.”
To make her point, she cited Pixelated Boat’s fake quote on Twitter, prefacing it with, “Orwell – the most lucid essayist of the 20th century – writes of truth, language and politics in a way that is eerily, and unwelcomingly fresh today.”
The Guardian has since removed the fake quote and appended this message to the bottom of its story.
“This article was amended on 26 January 2017 to replace an incorrect quote from 1984.”
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