NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language

Overview
The NCTE Orwell Award, established in 1975 and given by the NCTE Public Language Award Committee, recognizes writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse.

Nominations for the Award
The NCTE Public Language Award Committee is now seeking nominations for this year's Orwell Award, which honors an author, editor, or producer of a print or nonprint work that contributes to honesty and clarity in public language.

Nominations are also sought for the Doublespeak Award, which is given to a glaring example of deceptive language by a public spokesperson. The words must originate from an American. The committee needs a one-page description of the context in which the statement occurred and a copy of the print media source in which the quote appeared (with date). In the case of broadcast media, list the program, time, place, and date.

The nominations deadline is September 15, 2008. Eligible nominations are those appearing or published between July 1, 2007, and June 30, 2008. Send nominations to the NCTE Public Language Award Committee, c/o Kurt Austin, NCTE, 1111 W. Kenyon Road, Urbana, IL 61801-1096; fax: 217-328-0977; .

Past Recipients of the NCTE Orwell Award

2007
Ted Gup, author of Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life

In announcing the award, the NCTE Public Language Committee said, "Few developments in American politics have been so disturbing as the Bush Administration's dramatic expansion of executive privilege and its willingness to conduct much of the business of government in secret—from Vice President Cheney's energy plan before September 11, 2001, to the National Security Agency's unprecedented surveillance programs after 9/11. Unfortunately, American media coverage of the White House has done very little to explain the scope and the import of the Bush Administration's commitment to secret government. In Nation of Secrets, Ted Gup performs a truly essential public service, exploring and detailing the rise of what might be called an emergent culture of secrecy in America."

2006
Steven H. Miles, M.D, author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror

The NCTE Public Language Committee calls Miles’s book “a searing and silence-breaking book that indicts the American medical profession of complicity with the forms of torture now routinely carried out in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.”

The committee continues, “Miles shows not only that American medical personnel have falsified death certificates for detainees killed by coercive interrogations, but also that American psychiatrists and psychologists, working in Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, have actually used detainees' medical information to devise ‘physically and psychologically coercive interrogation plans’ tailored to individual interrogations. Such practices, as Dr. Miles argues, violate the American Medical Association’s strictures against the participation by medical personnel in torture; they violate the widespread international consensus, forged in the wake of the Holocaust, that doctors have no business aiding and facilitating gross human rights atrocities; they violate every moral precept associated with the practice of modern medicine.”

2005
Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show" Cast

“For regularly providing a penetrating critique of obfuscation, lying, and distortion of the media, corporations, and politicians,” Jon Stewart and the entire cast of "The Daily Show" are winners of the 2005 Orwell Award. Stewart and "The Daily Show" “have heightened public awareness of the lack of transparency of the public sphere and have armed increasing numbers of watchers (through the sharp edge of humor) with rhetorical tools for seeing their way through the fog.” 

Read a special statement on Ward Churchill from the 2005 Committee on Public Doublespeak.

2004
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and Writer Arundhati Roy

Seymour Hersh
As many United States media spent the past three years falling in line behind  the Bush Administration’s claims on Iraq and the "war on terror," Seymour Hersh has kept alive the tradition of independent investigative journalism, breaking crucial stories regarding the intelligence failures prior to 9/11; the neoconservatives' foolish reliance on Ahmed Chalabi and their pattern of deception regarding Iraq and WMD; and most recently, the tortures and rapes committed by US troops in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Arundhati Roy
Roy, a citizen of India, in her speeches, essays, and books has provided a needed perspective on the New Imperialism, not unlike the Old Imperialism in its avarice, egotism, over weaning ambition, and disregard for the people of the world who pay the price in desolation, disease, and violence. The New Imperialism, however, has new mechanisms, new strategies, new hypocrisies, new hidden motives, and new centers of power—all laundered by free market ideology. The new imperialism finds one of its key instruments in state action in defense of global markets. In her speech on "The New American Century" at the World Social Forum on January 16, 2004, Roy asserts that the start of making a better world is to identify current policies and actions by their proper names: occupation, colonization, imperialism, racism, institutionalized inequity, corruption, and genocide.

2003
Susan Ohanian 
Web site:  http://www.susanohanian.org

2002
Bill Press
Spin This! (Pocket Star, 2001)

2001
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
Trust Us, We’re Experts!: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future  (J. P. Tarcher,  2002)

2000
Alfie Kohn
The Schools Our Children Deserve (Houghton Mifflin, 1999)

1999
Norman Solomon
The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in the Mainstream News (published by Common Courage Press, 1999)

1998
Scott Adams and Juliet B. Schor

Scott Adams
The creator of the cartoon strip Dilbert and author of several Dilbert books was honored for his role in "Mission Impertinent" (San Jose Mercury News West Magazine, November 16, 1997;The farce highlighted the absurdity of managerial language and the overuse of the "mission statement."

Juliet B. Schor
The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer

1997
Gertrude Himmelfarb
"Professor Narcissus: In Today's Academy, Everything Is Personal," June 2, 1997, issue of The Weekly Standard

1996
William Lutz
The New Doublespeak: Why No One Knows What Anyone's Saying Anymore 

1995
Lies of Our Times
Lies of Our Times (LOOT): A Magazine to Correct the Record, was published between January 1990 and December 1994. It served not only as a general media critic, but as a watchdog of The New York Times, which the magazine referred to as "the most cited news medium in the U.S., our paper of record."

1994
Garry Trudeau
The creator of the cartoon strip "Doonesbury" was cited for consistently attacking doublespeak in all aspects of American life and from all parts of the cultural and political spectrum.

1993
Eric Alterman
Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics

1992
Donald Barlett and James Steele, Philadelphia Inquirer
America: What Went Wrong?

1991
David A. Kessler, Commissioner, Federal Food and Drug Administration
"Under the leadership of Commissioner Kessler," said William Lutz, chair of the NCTE Committee on Public Doublespeak, "the FDA has begun seizing products with misleading labels, developing new guidelines for clarity and accuracy in food labels, and exposing false, misleading, and deceptive health claims on food labels and in food advertising."

1990
Charlotte Baecher, Consumers Union
Selling America's Kids: Commercial Pressures on Kids of the 90s

1989
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

1988 Donald Barlett and James Steele, Philadelphia Inquirer
For a series of articles on the Tax Reform Act of 1986, in which they pointed out language disguising tax loopholes in the legislation

1987
Noam Chomsky
On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures

1986
Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

1985
Torben Vestergaard and Kim Schroder
The Language of Advertising

1984
Ted Koppel, moderator, "Nightline," ABC-TV
". . . a model of intelligence, informed interest, social awareness, verbal fluency, fair and rigorous questioning of controversial figures. . . . [who has sought] honesty and openness, clarity and coherence, to raise the level of public discourse."--William Lutz, chair, NCTE Committee on Public Doublespeak

1983
Haig Bosmajian
The Language of Oppression

1982
Stephen Hilgartner, Richard C. Bell, and Rory O'Connor
Nukespeak: Nuclear Language, Visions, and Mindset

1981
Dwight Bolinger
Language--The Loaded Weapon

1980
Sheila Harty
Hucksters in the Classroom: A Review of Industry Propaganda in Schools

1979
Erving Goffman
Gender Advertisements

1978
Sissela Bok
Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life

1977
Walter Pincus, Washington Post
"A patient, methodical journalist who knew his job and who knew the jargon of Washington. Mr. Pincus was the man responsible for bringing to public attention, and thus to a debate in the Senate, the appropriations funding for the neutron bomb."--Hugh Rank, chair, NCTE Committee on Public Doublespeak

1976
Hugh Rank
"Intensify/Downplay" schema for analyzing communication, persuasion, and propaganda

1975
David Wise
The Politics of Lying