Newspapers: everyone reads them, but do they tell the truth or are they just gossip and lies? In Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby the newspaper motif, used by each author, represents the lies the media tells and how people will believe those lies. The authors use the motif to promote the universal theme that the media is used to manipulate people's beliefs. In Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Koestler uses this motif to highlight the fact that the party uses newspapers for propaganda and that newspapers tell half-truths. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses the motif of newspapers to show that people prefer to read gossip. In both books, authors Koestler and Fitzgerald use the motif of newspapers to tell lies and hide the truth. In The Great Gatsby, “someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the expression 'crazy' as he bent over Wilson's body... it established the key to the newspaper accounts... Most of those accounts were a nightmare: grotesque, circumstantial, longing, and false” (163). This really states that the newspapers were lying about what happened to Wilson and Gatsby and that one term started it all. In Darkness at Noon it is said that in the cell at the top left of the window there is "a broken glass" on which "a piece of newspaper was stuck" (9), which means that the party is trying to hide the vision of Steal and hide the truth from him. The piece of newspaper on the window glass covers part of his external vision, which represents how the newspaper limits and clouds his beliefs and logic; the Party causes this because it controls the prison cells and allows its view to be obscured. The lies are shown again on page 11 when Rubashov believes that everything they publish is "nonsense" and is made up of old information that has been dug up. The "nonsense" they publish serves to hide the truth that people cannot know. From pages 196 to 203, when Vera reads the newspaper to Vassily, Rubashov's trial and his confession to his oppositional views are discussed, but it does not say how or why Rubashov confessed to these accusations. The newspaper will not say that Rubashov was tortured; he hides that detail to make it seem like everything Rubashov said was true.