“Weaponry for sale.”
Ukraine’s bottomless black market. A couple of postings back The Scrum published an exceptional piece of reportage from Donetsk City by Eva Karene Bartlett, a Canadian journalist who, extraordinarily enough in our time, does the work of a correspondent as it should be done….
Patrick Lawrence: When Correspondents Came Home
This is the first of a two-part series examining the collapse of foreign coverage in mainstream media. I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It…
Patrick Lawrence: The British “Bubble of Unreality”
I am following British politics during these, Boris Johnson’s final days as prime minister, with interest. It seems that the front-runner to replace the aging boarding-school boy is Liz Truss, who currently serves as foreign secretary. The thought that Truss…
Patrick Lawrence: A Hall of Mirrors
I have long wondered whether our mainstream journalists, correspondents and commentators get dressed each morning in the same locker room, so similarly do they account for things. This has been especially so in the case of the Ukraine crisis, which…
Patrick Lawrence: All Disquiet on the Eastern Front
Have you noticed the latest coming out of Eastern Europe—the Estonians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Czechs, and let us not forget the Ukrainians? Suddenly everyone thinks it is a good idea to begin shutting Russians, as in all Russians,…
Patrick Lawrence: So Far As I Can Make Out
Patrick Lawrence explores how the truth about Ukraine has turned into a recipe for anger and contempt from the Western media. So far as I can make out, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are losing their war against the Russian…
Eva Bartlett reports from Donetsk.
We take an unusual step as we publish the following piece by Eva Bartlett, the perspicacious Canadian correspondent whose practice it is to report from “the other side.” The Scrum does not customarily pick up pieces from other publications and reproduce them…
Patrick Lawrence: Reeking of Butter
The House speaker has just given off a reek of butter that seems to have sent the whole of East Asia in search of hankies. The Japanese have a wonderful expression they sometimes use to describe Westerners when they are…
Patrick Lawrence: Language and Its Enemies
Media critic Patrick Lawrence lays out how the aftermath and potential consequences of Pelosi’s Taiwan visit are made obscure by certain media outlets. The provoking and the provoked I can hardly keep up with the various versions of nonsense coming…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Pelosi Fallout
The U.S. now operates as a bulwark against time and history — a hopeless but destructive project. We witnessed a major breach in trans–Pacific relations last week in consequence of Nancy Pelosi’s self-indulgent, utterly failed maunder through East Asia. We…