“The ‘empire of pretend’ goes to war (again).”
A podcast exchange with Patrik Baab.
16 MARCH—“The information age is actually a media age,” the late John Pilger once observed. “We have war by media, censorship by media, demonology by media, retribution by media, diversion by media—a Surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.”
Patrick Lawrence has quoted the much-missed Australian-British journalist, who left us a little more than two years ago, on previous occasions—and there have been many of these warranting reference to Pilger’s thought. Another is now upon us. As Lawrence has observed elsewhere, the U.S.–Israeli aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran is yet another war the corporate press and broadcasters are effectively blacking out. Apart from the bombs, missiles, and drones, this is war by media, just as John would have described it. At this point, corporate media’s coverage of this latest assertion of imperial power is corrupted such that it makes a story unto itself.
“America is the only country in history that is able to run a global empire and its own people can’t see it,” Lawrence says in the podcast we publish today. “We have entered into a kind of great illusion. I call it the empire of pretend.” Once again, American media, and by extension the West’s altogether, are in the business not of informing readers and viewers so much as keeping them in the dark.
Patrik Baab, a distinguished German broadcast journalist and best-selling author—his website is here—sat down with Lawrence when they were in Switzerland to deliver lectures some months ago. Both, worth noting, are expatriates from the mainstream after decades of work in it. Patrik had just launched Gegen den Strom (Against the Stream), his interview and analysis podcast, and the two discussed media-related topics we find yet more pertinent today than they were then. They also address themes Lawrence took up in Journalists and Their Shadows, his memoir of his decades in corporate media and his years since as an independent journalist. ProMedia Verlag, the Viennese house, published a German-language edition, Journalisten und Ihre Schatten.
Patrik published this segment, “The Empire of Illusion,” two weeks ago. It runs 45 minutes. The Floutist is pleased to republish it.
—C. M.
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