PATRICK LAWRENCE: War as Presentation
As the U.S. midterm elections approach, the gap between Western media’s depiction of the war in Ukraine and the actual war waged on the ground appears to be widening more dramatically. We are urged at every turn to dismiss everything Vladimir Putin…
Our Coverage of the Ukraine War
CN has been ahead of the news on Ukraine, from reporting the coup and warning of nuclear catastrophe as far back as 2015, to news of the current phase of the conflict. Help us to continue our coverage. On Feb. 23,…
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…
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…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: 21st Century Order
As a piece of the new world order that is under construction, Putin’s trip to Tehran last week was of singular importance. At last we were able to read, last week, a New York Times story that concerned the Russians but not…
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,…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Biden’s Secret Stash
If this president didn’t know he was in possession of classified documents, in some cases for more than a decade, he simply is not qualified to hold any public office allowing him such access. There are two things I love about the…