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: 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…
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…
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…