ARTICLES
Patrick Lawrence: Atrocity Porn
The Russian army shelled its own detention center in the east of Ukraine. The Russian army shelled a nuclear power plant it has guarded since taking control of it last March. The Russian army wantonly shelled a maternity ward, a…
“‘The submissive void.'”
How propaganda works. We are pleased to welcome John Pilger, the distinguished journalist and filmmaker, into our pages once again. This article is a version of an address to the Trondheim World Festival, Norway. The writer edited his original. —P….
Patrick Lawrence: “The Narrative Is Coming Apart”
“In total, more than a thousand square kilometers of the territory of Ukraine have been liberated since the beginning of September,” Volodymyr Zelensky advised the world in his nightly video recently. The Ukrainian president, in his usual grubby T–shirt as…
Patrick Lawrence: Unmaking History
Every young journalist knows, and probably most newspaper readers know, too, the old thought: Journalists write the first draft of history. I like to think a few or more journalists and a few or more readers also know that this…
The Historic Collapse of Journalism
Accuracy no longer matters. Witnessing no longer matters. Conformity matters, writes Patrick Lawrence. 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 was a lengthy profile of…
The Chris Hedges Report: Ukraine and the Crisis of Media Censorship
Throughout the Ukraine war, Western news outlets have mindlessly parroted the opinions of a ruling elite and overseen a public discourse that is often unhinged from the real world.
Patrick Lawrence: When Correspondents Came Home, Part 2
September 11 was a paradigm shifting moment in American journalism. This is the second of a two-part series examining the collapse of foreign coverage in mainstream media. Part 1 of this series can be found here. A few days after the…
“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: Hearts Versus Minds
There is a time-honored and destructive tradition in the U.S. of citizens approaching their political causes with blind faith. I am seeing many fewer blue-and-yellow flags in evidence during wanderings in my corner of New England. Thank goodness that didn’t last long,…