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: Propaganda and Evidence
The wall of propaganda that towers over us, resting on an insidious culture of irrationality that has come to suffuse the American polity, is weakening. Finally. Finally our mainstream press and broadcasters show signs of waking up to the cynical,…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Putin Speaks
As the Russian president’s year-end presser helped underscore, Europe will increasingly understand itself as the western end of Eurasia rather than the eastern shore of the Atlantic. Vladimir Putin was “defiant” during his end-of-year press conference last Thursday. The Russian…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Obituary for Russiagate
The fraudulent fable has died, but its consequences live on. Russiagate, that fraudulent fable wherein Russian President Vladimir Putin personally subverted American democracy, Russian intelligence pilfered the Democratic Party’s email, and Donald Trump acted at the Kremlin’s behest, is at…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Psyops
The Deep State’s imperative to colonize independent media is now before us. Watch and listen, O you with open eyes and ears. The national security state’s long, very long campaign to control our press and broadcasters has taken a new…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: Instead of a Free Press
In the failed corporate coverage of Steven Donziger and Julian Assange there is an imposition of darkness, ignorance inflicted on Americans with intent. Just before the weekend came news that Steven Donziger, the courageous attorney who fought Chevron and won…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: A Different World Order
A new order among nations does not imply some kind of Orwellian Oceania — a globally homogenized superstate, the grotesque dream of liberal cosmopolitans. You have to applaud — and read carefully into — the events that followed Washington’s latest…
PATRICK LAWRENCE: The US Bubble of Pretend
The lack of objective, principled coverage of the war in Ukraine is a degenerate state of affairs. The one thing worse is the extent to which it’s perfectly fine with most Americans. It is perfectly obvious by now, to anyone…