
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…

Government Supervised Times, Wartime Reporting, and More
We talk to Patrick Lawrence about Ukraine by diving deeper into his recent articles written for ScheerPost.

Patrick Lawrence: The Causes of Things
Casus belli Over a summer sup on the back lawn the other night, a Times-reading, MSNBC–watching, NPR–listening neighbor asked what I thought she should read to acquire what she is not getting from these media, an accurate understanding of what goes…

Smoke and Mirrors
Zelensky’s purging of top officials as “traitors” ignored by Western media cheerleaders. Under Every Bed It has been quite a week for the regime in Kiev. On Sunday Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky suspended the head of his domestic intelligence service,…

Patrick Lawrence: This Week in Fake News / Artless Dodgers
Mark 6:4 There is the case of Seymour Hersh, the great investigative reporter whose work vaults across the years from the My Lai massacre to the dirty war in Syria. Sy published at The New York Times until he reported and wrote…

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…
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