Patrick Lawrence: This Week in Fake News / Blurred Truths
A veteran journalist’s weekly critique on the state of mass media Dependently ‘Independent’ No, I still haven’t got over the report in The New York Times this spring, wherein we learned of a joint American–Ukrainian campaign to inundate Russians with propaganda intended to…
Patrick Lawrence: The Power of Images
How the mainstream media uses images to define truth. In “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” an essay she published in The New York Review of Books in 1971, Hannah Arendt wrote of a phenomenon she called “defactualization.” Facts are fragile,…
Foreign Policy: The Warmonger’s Game
Patrick Lawerence on rescuing foreign policy from the elites. I had a letter in the mail the other week from someone named Barry Klein, who resides in Houston. I filed it knowing I would write about it, and now I…
“Latin America’s turning tide.”
It is pink again. It is difficult to overstate the significance of last Sunday’s elections in Colombia, which will shortly send Gustavo Petro to the presidential palace. Petro proposes fundamentally to alter the direction of Latin America’s fourth-largest economy and…
Why Did Twitter Cancel This Veteran Journalist?
Social media censorship is threatening our press freedoms, the First Amendment, and at the horizon what remains of our democratic polity. I was leafing through the overnight Twitter feed over breakfast a couple of months ago when the screen on…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Summit of No-Shows
This could prove an historic shift, reversing more than a century of usually coercive influence in Latin America. I tip my cap, as we all should, to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico. And to Presidents Luis Arce of Bolivia, Xiaomara…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Taiwan Talk
We are witnessing the gradual dismantling of strategic ambiguity in favor of the clarity urged by Trump’s belligerent secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. Watching President Joe Biden’s stunningly clumsy performance in Tokyo last week, during which he committed the U.S. to…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The New Iron Curtain
The Ukraine crisis proves to be Europe’s crucible and Europe proves a profound disappointment. We have read a great deal about a new Cold War since the U.S. cultivated the coup of February 2014 in Ukraine and the nation was…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Nation of ‘Geophobes’
Amid rampant Russophobia and Sinophobia, America’s penchant for Cold-War “national character analysis” will — if left unchecked — lead the U.S. into deepest trouble. Ruminating on the American condition some years ago, I invented a word to describe us as…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Who Should Control Foreign Policy?
Proposing that foreign policy be subjected to democratic processes is a call, essentially, to revolution. I had a letter in the mail the other week from someone named Barry Klein, who resides in Houston. I filed it knowing I would write…