Patrick Lawrence: Our Shared Addiction to Empire
“If the Columbus myth has been thoroughly discounted, what is it that causes us to continue closing the banks, stopping the mail, and marching in parades on a Monday around October 12 each year?” Columbus Day: I wasn’t sure America…
Patrick Lawrence: Sins of Silence
The media’s treatment of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage is reminiscent of a time in the 60s when disaster could have been avoided with responsible reporting. In early April 1961, New York Times correspondent Tad Szulc filed a story from…
Patrick Lawrence: The Strong, and the Merely Powerful
In the world order now emerging, it is genuinely strong nations that will prevail over those reliant on power alone, and force will have little to do with it. Vladimir Putin’s speech from the Kremlin last Friday, delivered to the nation…
Patrick Lawrence: The West—Technocrats, Incompetents, Ideologues
When the Italian Senate names party leader Giogia Meloni premier at the end of October, as is widely expected, Italy will be the first founding member of the European Union to be governed by a vigorously nationalist coalition. We are…
Patrick Lawrence: In the Terrain of Word War III
The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) advanced decisively into Russian-held territory in northeastern Ukraine two weeks ago, exposing the weakness, incompetence, and cowardice of Russian soldiers and officers. The tide of this war has turned. The Russian army is on…
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…
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 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…
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