Patrick Lawrence: The Return of Non-Alignment
The Ukraine conflict as catalyst: I wonder how many people who pay attention understood a year ago that Russia’s intervention and the West’s extravagant support for the Kyiv regime would prompt fundamental shifts in the global order such that the…
Patrick Lawrence: Russia Takes Another Step Back From the West
News that Russia will suspend its participation in the New START nuclear arms pact, which arrived Tuesday via Vladimir Putin’s annual address to the Federal Assembly, had to land hard. This suspension is not a withdrawal, as various Western media…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Totalized Censorship
Content warning, canceling, de-platforming, denying access: The fate of Sy Hersh’s Democracy Now! interview on YouTube is the latest indication of how much rougher press suppression is in this new media era. When I awoke Sunday morning to the news that YouTube…
Patrick Lawrence: Munich as Propaganda Fest
I love Wang Yi’s response when The New York Times’s Michael Crowley caught him in a hallway at the Munich Security Conference Saturday and asked the Chinese foreign minister if he planned to meet Secretary of State Antony Blinken on…
Patrick Lawrence: Objectivity and Its Discontents
Look, it is one thing for reporters and line editors to abandon the fundamental principle of objectivity as they hurl their hatchets at those who provoke their prejudices—Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, this, that or the other governor or senator, this,…
“‘Self-transcendence.'”
The earthquakes and America’s lapsed humanity. You saw this coming and posed the question as soon as news broke of the earthquakes in Syria and Turkey on 6 February. Will the Biden regime find it within itself to set aside…
Patrick Lawrence: No, Joey, It Still Isn’t Morning in America
O.K., you have a speech of 7,000–odd words to deliver to Congress. It ought to run about an hour as these things go. But you have nothing to say. Call Joe Biden. He certainly got the job done Tuesday evening….
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Press Reckoning on Russiagate
Jeff Gerth’s investigation for The Columbia Journalism Review exposes the dark heart of the news media’s coverage of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. In the autumn of 1973, Jack Anderson, the wonderful iconoclast of the Washington press corps, published…
Patrick Lawrence: The Pentagon’s Balloon Floats On
It is just as well that Antony “Guardrails” Blinken has called off his long-scheduled visit to Beijing, which was due to begin Tuesday. It would have been his first since taking over at State and the first by a secretary of…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: What Dan Ellsberg Means
The term “Fourth Estate” had taken on the dust of a neglected antique before the release of the Pentagon Papers. Afterwards it seemed possible to think again of the press as the independent pole of power required by a working democracy. …