The commercial or mainstream press is a megaphone for the ruling class. It genuflects before establishment politicians, generals, intelligence chiefs, corporate heads and hired apologists who carried out the corporate coup d’état that created our system of inverted totalitarianism.

Journalists and Their Shadows (w/ Patrick Lawrence) | The Chris Hedges Report

The corporate structures that have a stranglehold on the country and have overseen deindustrialization and the evisceration of democratic institutions, plunging over half the country into chronic poverty and misery, are in the eyes of legacy journalists unassailable.

They are portrayed as forces of progress. The criminals on Wall Street, including the heads of financial firms such as Goldman Sachs or for-profit health care corporations such as UnitedHealth, are treated with reverence. Free trade is equated with freedom. Deference is paid to democratic processes, liberties, electoral politics and rights enshrined in our Constitution, from due process to privacy, that no longer exist.

It is a vast game of deception under the cover of a vacuous morality. Those cast aside by corporate capitalism—Noam Chomsky calls them “unpeople”—are rendered invisible and reviled at the same time. The “experts” whose opinions are amplified on every issue, from economics to empire and politics, are drawn from corporate-funded think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, or are former military and intelligence officials or politicians who are responsible for the failure of our democracy and usually in the employ of corporations.

Cable news also has the incestuous habit of interviewing its own news celebrities. The most astute critics of empire, including Andrew Bacevich, are banished, as are critics of corporate power, including Ralph Nader and Chomsky. Those who decry the waste within the military, such as MIT Professor Emeritus Ted Postol, who exposed the useless $13 billion anti-ballistic missile program, are unheard.

Advocates of universal health care, such as Dr. Margaret Flowers, are locked out of national health care debates. There is a long list of the censored. The acceptable range of opinion is so narrow it is almost nonexistent.

How did this happen? How did the press turn itself into a fawning echo chamber for the billionaire class? What does this mean for our fading democracy? What can we do to fight back? Joining me to discuss the decrepit state of journalism is Patrick Lawrence who worked for many years overseas for the International Herald Tribune and Far Eastern Economic Review. He is the author of Journalists and Their Shadows.

You start the book, Patrick, with the Cold War. This was perhaps the training ground for the state that we’re in. You write, you’re talking about the major dailies and the networks,

“They delivered the Cold War to our doorsteps, to our car radios, into our living rooms. They defined a consciousness. They told Americans who they were and what made them American and altogether what made America America. A free press was fundamental to this self-image and Americans nursed a deep need to believe they had one. Our newspapers and networks went to elaborate lengths to give this appearance of freedom and independence. That this was a deception, that American media had surrendered themselves to the new national security state and its various Cold War crusades is now an open and shut matter of record. I count it among the bitterest truths of the last seventy five years of American history.”

You’ll actually go on in the book and argue that where we are now is worse but let’s begin there because I think it is an important kind of winnowing journalists like I.F. Stone, of course, are pushed out of even The Nation magazine wouldn’t publish Stone. The Nation magazine pushed you out I think over Ukraine right? Russiagate.

Patrick Lawrence

Russia, Russiagate.

Chris Hedges

The fantasy of Russiagate. But let’s begin with that, what happened to the press.

Patrick Lawrence

Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Delighted to see you again. One of the things I wanted to do with the book, one of three, is to give the present press mess, as I call it, a history. Most, I don’t know what percentage of your listeners lived through those years, the Cold War, part of it, all of it, none of it, but what’s going on now has a long history.

It goes back to the earliest days of the Cold War. And it is extraordinary the extent to which the mistakes and derelictions of that time are being repeated with just astonishing exactitude, the same things.

Why? Because the errors and corruptions of that time were never acknowledged. And if you don’t acknowledge your mistakes, you cannot learn from them. The press is not an institution fond of learning from its mistakes. So I wanted to give it a history, first of all.

I think it’s important if we’re going to understand where we are first and where we might go second, you need to know the past, right? That was my objective there.

Chris Hedges

Well, let’s just characterize it. First of all, I don’t think they were mistakes. The careerists within the press read the landscape very, very well. I once had dinner with the odious Joseph Alsop, who proceeded to get drunker and drunker. And I was a young graduate student, I was a seminary student and turned on me in this company and railed on my generation who didn’t know the Bible or Shakespeare, both of which I knew far better than Joseph Alsop.

I read the Bible in Greek. But let’s talk a little bit about, you developed a class of journalists who catered to what C. Wright Mills called the power elite during the Cold War. Many of them, as you point out in the book, were recruited by the CIA or at least served as useful idiots for the CIA in terms of feeding information. And this was very common in the Cold War.

If you signed on for that quote unquote crusade for patriotism against communism, you did very, very well. And you’ve worked at the International Herald Tribune, I worked at the New York Times. We’re talking about consummate careerists. So what you call, we’re the mistakes. We’re the ones who actually thought journalism was about integrity and we got pushed out. So let’s be clear about that. These people didn’t make a mistake. They made very astute career choices.

Patrick Lawrence

Let me change, I stand corrected, let me change the word, not mistakes, transgressions. Can we live with that?

Chris Hedges

Alright.

Patrick Lawrence

Transgressions of principle. Yeah. Where to begin? There are a few ways to discuss this. One is the professionalization of the craft. There are two ways to use that term. One is to learn your trade, learn your techniques and all that. You’re a professional in your procedures. I quite value that.

The way I mean it in the book is professionalization as it began in the 1920s when journalists began to identify themselves not as residents of an independent pole of power reporting on the institutions they would be charged with observing, but as part of the power structure, a disastrous drift in the profession.

It goes back to Walter Lippmann in the 20s. He wrote three books about the press. In a certain way, that’s what they were about. So the professionalization.

Chris Hedges

Well, let’s stop with Lippmann because Lippmann is an extremely important figure because his thesis is that the general public is just too clueless to understand how to manage ruling institutions and therefore he argues, in essence, that they should be kept in ignorance, manipulated, used, and that should be left up to what you call the quote unquote professional class, including this new professional class, the press.

And as you point out in the book, before all this, journalists were working class stiffs who didn’t go to college. And that, I mean, you could hold a sizable reunion for any Ivy League school now in the newsroom of the New York Times, or at least when I was there.

Patrick Lawrence

Yeah, I mean, [H. L.] Mencken is great on that. You know, I quote him saying, you know, in the old days, a reporter made the same salary as a bartender or a police sergeant. Now he’s making what a doctor or a lawyer makes.

He noted that with some regret. Now, with Lippmann, I mentioned later in the book what are known as the Lippmann-Dewey debates in the 1920s. In fact, there were never any formal debates, but they exchanged by way of their books and reviews of their books. Lippmann considered, as you say very well, these two were formulating these ideas as America was becoming a mass society. That’s the background.

And Lippmann considered people are simply incapable of understanding the world around them. They have to be told what’s going on. They’re too busy. They’re too distant from power. So the function of the journalist is, as a messenger, if you will, sort of a tribune, part of the power elite. Bearing the policies and judgments and directives of the powerful, the political structure downward to the population. That was his notion of what the press was supposed to do.

Along came [John] Dewey. I’m not a great Dewey man, but I think he was correct in this, right? He said, no, the journalist has to stand, as I put it, has to stand in a different place. He has to stand outside of power and present to readers and viewers the known considerations whenever a question of national policy was at issue, and engender a public debate so people could draw their conclusions and register those conclusions.

That was the function of the journalist, right? Again, I have a lot of problems with Dewey. That’s a separate conversation. But on this point, where the journalist was located, he was right, right? Now, what do we have now? We have an emphatically Lippmannite press corps, right? These people don’t, so far as I can make out, are completely happy that this is understood as we’re talking about it.

We are part of the power structure and we are handing down to you what’s going to happen, supposedly why, although that’s never very clear, and how you should think. Remember, it was Lippmann who gave us the manufacture of consent. That was in one of the three books he wrote in the 20s, the period I’m talking about.

Chris Hedges

Let’s talk about what happened. You write that everything began to close after the 1975 defeats in Southeast Asia wounded the American psyche and rattled the power elite. Then it disappeared more or less completely as the Cold War years gave way to the post-Cold War triumphalism that marked the 1990s.

There followed the events of 2001, these were the 9/11 attacks. These proved a decisive moment in our media’s return to the worst of many bad habits they had formed during the 1950s. So you mark that notion of a unipolar world with the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was in Eastern and Central Europe then and watched it.

But then you also mark 9/11 when the country, after these attacks, drank that very dark elixir of nationalism. And the flip side of nationalism, of course, is racism. And began these military debacles that continue to this day in Ukraine and Gaza and everywhere else. But talk about those historical moments.

Patrick Lawrence

Okay, remember beginning the afternoon of September 11th and running for some days afterward, the constant repetition of the planes colliding with the towers, I’m sure everyone listening will recall that. My view is that that was what the literary critics call an objective correlative, okay? That moment was really most profoundly understood, most profoundly as a matter of psychology.

Americans until that moment were taught from [John] Winthrop onward that we are immune from history, right? As [Arnold J.] Toynbee once said, history is what happens to other people. At that moment, that mythology came to an end. Suddenly, we are as vulnerable to time and history as the rest of the world. It was a profound shock.

And I think at the level of the imperium, the policy cliques began to understand the world had profoundly changed. And at that point, the press needed to be… so it was, a new set of circumstances, well, new, with a history, a new set of circumstances and the press had to be recruited. There’s a passage in the book recounting what happened a few days after 9/11. Bush’s press secretary, forgive me, I forget his name.

Chris Hedges

Ari Fleischer.

Patrick Lawrence

Ari Fleischer called in all the heavyweights in the Washington press corps, the senior editors mostly, perhaps a correspondent here or there, maybe Tom Friedman, people like that, and said, look, we don’t want you reporting stories that reflect badly on what we are about to start doing.

Meaning, as they say, sources and methods, right? And we know what those turned out to be, the ugliness of it all, right? Jill Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the Times at that moment, later the executive editor to no great result, recounted that conversation. And she said, we all readily agreed to cooperate. And she added, and indeed for many years, we never wrote anything that displeased the White House.

It was a very important moment. And I picked that time because that’s my date for the very sudden, abrupt end of the American century. Not everybody agrees with me, but that’s my date. It’s been making messes ever since in the aftermath. And at that moment, the gears shifted, so to speak, and the press got right on side the way they did in [Harry S.] Truman’s later years and through the 50s as a reenlisted soldier. That’s why I picked 2001.

Chris Hedges

Well, 2001 was finally, the rest of the world spoke to us in the language that we for decades had used to speak to them, which was death and explosions in a city skyline. And you’re right, and this is from your book on that issue,

“Their purpose turned subtly at first and then very plainly from informing the public

to protecting the institutions they purported to report upon from the public’s gaze.”

We should also note, although it’s not raised in your book, that this coincided with the economic downturn at media institutions and in particular major dailies so that their advertising revenues became so constricted and they became even more obsequious to the centers of power. You had written earlier that there was a place in the mainstream then, if not a large place, for journalists who held to the ideals, principles, and purpose that commonly draw people into the profession.

But I think the twin combination, and I was based in Paris and covered Al-Qaeda for the New York Times in Europe and the Middle East, and so was part of those discussions along with the odious Judy Miller at The New York Times, I would come back to New York for these meetings.

But they were all, it wasn’t that they were cynical, they were all true believers. And the French who did not want us to go into Iraq had given me massive access to very secret intelligence that they had in an effort, not because I was a great reporter, because it was The New York Times.

And I would come back with very hard information because Iraq, of course, had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11, and it would just be dismissed. Well, that’s not what Dick Cheney told us, that’s not what Lewis “Scooter” Libby told us, that’s not Richard Perle…

So it was completely unquestioning. And as you write, the major dailies and the wire services routinely report the assertions of government officials as if these assertions alone were evidence of their veracity. And that is, of course, precisely what happened.

I want to talk about, it was a little thing but important that you picked up on, and it was this what you call this Jekyll and Hyde quality of… you were working for the International Herald Tribune, I was working for the New York Times, and I immediately knew what you were speaking about, and what it is is this split because these institutions pay deference to all of these values, journalistic independence and fearlessness and democracy dies in darkness or whatever.

But of course, it’s a masquerade. They are serving the centers of power. But for journalists who actually care about those values, it makes these institutions rife with anxiety. I had a colleague of great conscience who used to come into the New York Times and go to the bathroom and throw up every morning before he went to work. But that tension, that, and you do write about that within the institution, but I don’t want to let that go because I think it’s important.

Patrick Lawrence

Yeah. You took me into the second of three themes I wanted to explore in the book and that’s reflected in the title, Journalists in Their Shadows, not to go too far into psychoanalysis, but I drew that from [Carl] Jung, okay, who argued we all have what he called shadows.

That part of ourselves that is obscured by social convention, orthodox morality, acceptance among peers, the professional coercions from employers and all that it creates in all of us something Jung called the shadow, the hidden self, the obscured self, right?

Now, my argument is that is exceptionally important, I can’t overstate this, exceptionally important in the case of journalists, because when they become, when their selves are divided, that’s when the compromises begin. It’s a psychological question. It’s a psychosocial question.

The corruptions in the press begin with the corruptions of the personalities who want to get paid, want to be promoted, and so on. And my argument, I call it disintegration. As I mentioned, the pastor in my little New England town taught me the relationship between two words, integration and integrity.

And working in the mainstream, I’m sure it was your experience, I’ll bet it was, that people become loyal to the orthodoxies imposed by employers. And they become so immersed in it, they don’t even know their condition of alienation from themselves, right? It’s a serious thing and a very serious phenomenon.

Now, the small place allowed for journalists and correspondents who were able to defend their ideals and principles, I had this experience myself, and I was encouraged to explore the thought by the late John Pilger, who is older than me by some years, but that was his experience too, right?

And he encouraged me to recognize it was there, but it closed out. It was never a large space, but it shut down. Again, after 2001, I think, is when that happened, right? It was never a generously proportioned section of the segment of the craft, but it was there. And suddenly it wasn’t there.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, it was there, but you were a management headache, and if you were not finally domesticated, they pushed you out. It was there, but none of these reporters had a long shelf life within, they certainly were not promoted within the institution.

Sydney Schanberg was a friend of mine from the killing fields and won the Pulitzer in Cambodia, came back, ran the Metro Desk, went after the big developers that were friends of the publisher, and he was finished. Abe Rosenthal, the editor, during that period, of the New York Times, used to call him my little commie. I just have to read this little description from the New York Times because, although I didn’t spend much time in the newsroom, I was hired by the foreign desk, spent seven months, which was enough, and then was back overseas.

“The 43rd Street newsroom,” that’s the old Times building, “turned out to be worse,” because you worked briefly for the New York Times as an editor, “turned out to be worse than my worst imaginings. Ill-will and bloody mindedness were ground into the worn industrial carpet. There was too much power at stake, my diagnosis, and too many people pursuing it too single-mindedly. Editors and reporters seemed to think solely of appearing clever out front where the managing editors sat. I could detect only slight interest in what was going on in the world and into the news pages. No wonder so many journalists forgetting why they were journalists were indifferent to or simply unaware of their place in the ideological order getting in, getting wise and getting out never seemed so fine an idea.”

This disintegration that you mentioned, and I’m sure you saw this, it breaks these people. By the time these reporters and editors who come in, with a certain, many of them with a certain amount of idealism, they are completely broken individuals. I mean, there’s a kind of [protagonist of Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman”] Willy Loman type quality to these guys in their 50s. They just have been destroyed by these institutions.

Patrick Lawrence

Yeah. Again, it’s a psychological phenomenon. I reference this term of [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s, mauves fois, bad faith. They become reenactments of journalists. Newspapers are reenactments of newspapers. There’s a kind of meta quality to it. Two points, one, it’s endemic. People drawing salaries from the Wash Post or the Times, listening to this now would, I’m certain, would either not know what we were talking about, not because they’re immune to the phenomenon, but because they’re so far inside it they can’t see out, or they would deny it vehemently with the passionate conviction of converts, right? Because they have assumed the ideology of he who writes the checks, right?

I mentioned René Descartes in the book. I think, therefore I am becomes I am, therefore I think. I am a Washington Post reporter and therefore I think this, right? That’s how it works.

Second point here to rotate the perspective, this is why I don’t have a great deal of hope for the mainstream press, legacy press, however you wish to call it, coming good on all these questions. I think it’s a self-destructed institution and it’s why I put the considerable faith, if faith is the word, why I put considerable confidence in independent media as the source of the profession’s dynamism and future.

Chris Hedges

All of that is true, except of course the digital platforms that are now embedded in the national security state are using every, whether it’s algorithms or deplatforming or demonetizing to essentially stomp out independent media. I want to talk about another important point that you make having been a foreign correspondent, which you call the reality of difference. The making and maintaining of a psychological construct commonly called self and other, that is extremely important point in terms of how you report the world.

You also bring up the fact that large newspapers like the New York Times, they’ll never let you stay in a foreign bureau more than three to five years because of what you write about, this reality of difference. Explain what that is and why it buttresses not only our ignorance but a particular worldview.

Patrick Lawrence

Yeah, the reality of difference means very simply, American ideology, if I can use that blanket term, requires that we distinguish ourselves as the exceptional people on the face of the earth, and all others are in one measure “others”, right?

If you’re talking about the French or the British, okay, they are a friendly people, sympathetic people, but they are fundamentally different from us, you know? Their systems are different. Well, French have quite a good healthcare system, but that’s France, they’re different, right? When you get to non-Western people beginning at the top of the pyramid with the Japanese and on down, they are really very different.

And to report those sort of places, I, from the beginning of my career, was interested in non-Western countries, third world problems and all that. These people are profoundly, sort of, if I may say, otherized, right? And you report them as almost specimens, right? You report them from behind a pane of glass through which you will never pass.

And you mentioned that standard tour for a correspondent, three to five years, that’s right, because after that period, correspondents tend to understand the country or countries they’re reporting a little too well for the foreign editor’s taste, right?

Wait a minute, you’re actually writing about this country from their perspective, you’re showing us the world the way it looks to these people, no. If you were in Berlin, you got to go to Buenos Aires now, right? Start all over again. Don’t understand others too thoroughly.

Chris Hedges

Well, the point is you begin not only to understand them, you begin to understand us. And that’s what they don’t want.

Patrick Lawrence

Yeah, they’re all mirrors. Yeah, I mean, the correspondent, a good one, the light bulb goes on some years into an assignment. I am asking 1,000 questions. And as I get the answers, I’m learning about myself.

Chris Hedges

And there’s another aspect you lift up, which I think is important. You talk about how Western correspondents covering the non-West de-factualized the story. And you’re right about that. Explain what you mean by that.

Patrick Lawrence

Well, my experience was primarily, my formative years as a correspondent were late 70s, you know, the height of the Cold War, or maybe a little past its peak, but still a very serious reality, right? And I reported primarily in East Asia, not only in East Asia, but primarily.

And you had the dictatorships in Korea, Indonesia, the famous case of the Marcos’ in the Philippines, sort of, so to speak, strongman governments in Malaysia, places like that. And then the Japanese case, we reinvented the Japanese after the ‘45 defeat and installed the Liberal Democratic Party and made sure it stayed there and installed, right?

We couldn’t report these phenomena as they were. We couldn’t proceed into the zone of cause and effect, how did the South Korean dictators get there? How did Suharto get there in ‘65 when Sukarno, who, I love Sukarno, he was one of the great people of the 20th century, when he was deposed in a CIA operation, these things could not be discussed.

It was all about, in the case of the Japanese, the Japanese miracle, right? There was no miracle in Japan. It was what I call a Cold War social contract. America committed to buying the exports of all these countries. This is why the East Asians are so addicted to exports.

Committed to buying the exports of these countries so that they could make a social contract with their citizens that went this way: We will give you material prosperity. You can have a refrigerator or a color TV or a little tiny Japanese car, maybe for the first time in your family’s history, but you can’t touch politics. That’s the deal, right?

But you could watch this if you were alert and immune to the ideological ruts. You could understand it, but you couldn’t write about it.

Chris Hedges

This raises the other point and that is the absence of context, absence of history. I like Robert Fisk, I don’t if you knew Bob, he was a good friend of mine.

Patrick Lawrence

I didn’t know him, but I certainly knew of him.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, and his book, The Great War for Civilization, which is a great book on the modern Middle East, but it marries his reporting, he was in the Middle East for 44 years, it marries his reporting with his deep understanding of history.

But if you don’t understand the history, and nothing is contextualized, then when you get an eruption, for instance on October 7th by the Palestinians with incursion into Israel, because it’s not put in context, it’s presented within the media as incomprehensible, and with it, the people who carried it out become incomprehensible.

Patrick Lawrence

Yeah, I mean this happens, I don’t need to tell you Chris, this happens as a matter of daily routine as we speak, right? How many people have the context required to understand events in Syria these past couple of weeks? Not many. Context is in a sense, context in history.

I had a list of five things. Context, history, causality, agency, and responsibility are all essential for us to understand events in the world around us. And none is permitted to any effective extent in corporate media. Things happen, things happen out of nowhere. Why did that happen? Well, those other people, there’s no explaining them, right? It doesn’t make sense to us because we’re different from them, et cetera, right?

Here’s a good one. Here’s a perfect one for us. The “unprovoked” Russian military operation in Ukraine, unprovoked, unprovoked, unprovoked. That is the stripping out of history and context, plain and simple. In this case, it’s so boldly deceitful.

You don’t have to be a graduate student in history at the University of Wisconsin to know what went on before February 24th, 2022. 30 years of it, right? And then the coup in 2014, the eight years of bombardment, savage bombardment of Russian speakers in the East, it’s all there. But the media erase it with exceptional daring. And the force of media, the force of incessant presentation makes this kind of thing so regrettably effective. Yeah, that’s what we mean by context. Perfect example.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk about, you quote from the book, The Eclipse of Reason, “Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives,” as [German philosopher and sociologist Max] Horkheimer writes, “has come to be regarded as obsolete. And you write, this surrender to the irrational does great damage to the surrendering society as is evident as we look out our windows. It is near to fatal for the practice of journalism.” Talk about that surrender to the irrational.

Patrick Lawrence

Okay, I like that book, Horkheimer’s book. It’s not a very long book. It’s a very accessible book if any of your listeners or reviewers are interested in finding it. You can find it on the used book sites, The Eclipse of Reason. What he was talking about, and this was 1947 that was published, listeners take note, that was the beginning of the Cold War, right?

He’s talking about the Socratic process of reasoning is you take a circumstance and you advance through the known universe of facts and evidence and you arrive at a conclusion. You are not in charge of the conclusion. What you learn on the way will lead you to the correct conclusion. This has been turned upside down in our hyper ideological polity such that you draw your conclusion first and then you reason backwards, Russiagate a perfect example.

This is how it has to come out. Now let’s reason backwards to support the conclusion we’ve already drawn. It’s a living disaster for our profession, given that we trade in facts and evidence and research.

As the wonderful Bob Perry put it, he’s in the book briefly, I don’t care what the truth is, I just care what the truth is. That’s out the window now. I care what the truth is, and I’m going to make a case to support my version of the truth. It’s not an operative way to conduct yourself as a journalist but pick up any major daily that’s what you’re reading.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk, it’s a small point, but it of course resonated with me because I’ve experienced it. They don’t ever embrace the ideology they promote, but the way that they censor, and you’re writing about one of your own experiences, you say stories written beyond the ideological fence posts are never thrown back for that reason. As the fence posts cannot be acknowledged, it is always, we want better sourcing or not enough solid reporting here or the catch-all you don’t support your case.

Patrick Lawrence

You must have… I can sense I’m ringing some of your bells here, right? I laid that out because any professional reading the book will say, oh my God, yeah, that, right? Look, I recounted one of my direct experiences when in my latter days at the Herald Tribune, the New York Times had bought out the Washington, it was a condominium ownership. The New York Times owned 50% and the Post owned 50%. Yeah.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, but let me just interrupt, Patrick. It was a good newspaper because it had editorial independence from both.

Patrick Lawrence

Yeah, and the head office was in Paris. It made a big difference. But anyway, the Times made the Post a very unpleasant offer it couldn’t refuse. And so the Times suddenly owned all of it.

Chris Hedges

Well, they threatened to destroy the Herald Tribune. Let’s be clear, it was like the mafia.

Patrick Lawrence

Yeah. You know the story. And so the Times, the Trib, you know, it was one of those publications where there was that space we were discussing earlier. The Trib began the process of “Timesification.” And that is the occasion for the one experience I had. I had been editing the Asian edition. They took me off of that because they needed a Times man.

And they made me sort of a roving correspondent for the region. OK, I kind of thought my correspondent days were over, but I said, all right, let’s try this. And I wrote a story that I knew very, I thought, you better get this over with. You better determine once and for all who these people are.

I wrote a story for them that was a very good Herald Tribune story. No ideology, kind of a worldly perspective, not informed by any kind of nationalist orthodoxy. Just look at things the way they are. This is one reason I think the location of the Trib’s newsroom in Paris was important. Write that story and see what happens.

Chris Hedges

Let me just interrupt. It was a story about the decline of American influence and hegemony. The rise of what we call a multipolar world, in particular China.

Patrick Lawrence

Yeah, exactly. That’s right. Russia, China, Iran peripherally, you know, as I say in the book, I’ll eat my hat or anything else people propose if that story written in 2006 is not the world that’s out our windows today, right? So I wrote the story and I filed the story and it came back from my editor with all these, with all these not really objections, but do a little more work here.

As I say in the book, the piece was brass plated by the time I gave it to them because I knew it would face headwinds. My editor in Hong Kong finally gave up. I answered all his questions. So he sent it to Paris.

The newsroom in Paris raised all sorts of other questions. I answered those questions. They still didn’t want to publish it. They sent it to New York. And then the foreign editor, some national security correspondents whose name I’d love to mention but won’t, and some bureau chiefs in Asia had a look at it, right? Now, the conflicts of interest are glow in the dark.

I had a story they didn’t have. And they went on and on about, one of them said, tired old sources. Another one said what I said and what I repeated in the book, poorly sourced, can’t tell what it’s about and so on. And finally it popped out the other end of the pipeline from my editor in Hong Kong: Patrick, we just can’t run this. That’s all. We just can’t run this. You’re talking about the upper echelons of American journalism.

As I say in the book, I have a great affection for that phrase ever since, the upper echelons of American journalism. That’s what happens. Nobody at any time, this is your point, nobody at any time could say, Patrick, this is not the orthodoxy. We’re defending American primacy here and you’re questioning it. That was the rub. But that can’t be said, right?

Chris Hedges

Sy Hirsch wrote a great memoir, Reporter, which everyone should read, but he recounts exactly a long investigative piece he did on Gulf and Western. Very similar process, he left the paper not long after that.

But before we close, I want to ask, because I have a slight disagreement with you, you hold up WikiLeaks, the coverage of the Vietnam War, Watergate, all as moments of integrity, that may not be your word, in American journalism. I don’t.

The Vietnam War, for me, the coverage changed once public opinion changed. The press is a reactive force that doesn’t lead in terms of Watergate. All of those tactics, this is Noam Chomsky, had been used on anti-war groups and dissidents, the Black Panthers including assassinating Fred Hampton. But the press didn’t care about it until the elite started devouring their own, i.e. the Republican administration of Nixon went after the Democratic Party.

And in the case of WikiLeaks, and I was at the New York Times, I think that they were shamed that by not publishing the revelations of WikiLeaks, they would have been exposed for who they were. They did, though, that publication, a collaboration with Julian Assange with their teeth grit and knew the moment the ink was dry, their next step was to destroy Julian Assange.

Comment briefly on that and then I want to talk about where we’re going.

Patrick Lawrence

Okay, okay. Yeah, I understand. I mean, what you seem to be saying is the political environment counted in all of these cases. Watergate would not have happened if considerable factions of the Washington power elite had turned against Nixon.

The coverage we in the profession and others I suppose admire from Vietnam, [David] Halberstam, Malcolm Brown, [inaudible] and all those people. I don’t think that coverage would have come to be if considerable portions of the power elite in Washington, the policy cliques and of course the anti-war movement hadn’t turned against the war. That’s what I mean by political environment counts.

WikiLeaks, I hadn’t thought of it the way you do, they were embarrassed. I remember in autumn of 2010 when there was a big release of WikiLeaks documents. Forgive me, I can’t remember which ones they were.

Chris Hedges

2010 were the Iraqi war logs.

Patrick Lawrence

Yeah, okay. I remember on the front page of the Times, David Sanger, happy to mention his name, acknowledged that The Times has checked with the administration to make sure of what we can publish and what we can’t. You tell that story later on, people can’t believe it, but it was there and it’s, in fact, it’s routine, okay? I think the key, I had it a little differently than you. I thought, I took it that the corporate media, mainstream press, saw in the Assange operation a real change in what journalism could be. But I think you might be closer to the mark. They had no choice.

The key moment, I think, is when [Mike] Pompeo, the odious Pompeo, gave a speech at CSIS [Center for Strategic and International Studies], I think, and called Assange a Russian actor, all these phrases they make up, and turned on him. That was, forgive me my dates, 2011, 2012, so that’s when the media turned and said, okay, we can go after this guy now. And he became a sort of, as I recount in the book, a sort of sacred outcast, right? And they went right to town on Assange, just in the way you have suggested.

Chris Hedges

Well, WikiLeaks threatened their entire model of journalism. I mean, they had to destroy them. And I can tell you, because I know, I was inside with Bill Keller and all these other… They hated, hated Assange.

Patrick Lawrence

Were you still inside the paper at that time?

Chris Hedges

In 2010, no. But of course I know all these people. I mean, I know them and well. Keller was my foreign editor before he became executive editor. No, they had a vested interest in the moment it was published in destroying Julian. I want to talk about independent media. Independent media has always been the check on the commercial press.

That goes back to Ida B. Wells and before the great crusading journalists set up her newspaper in Memphis that exposed the reality of lynching, which was nothing about Black men sexually assaulting white women. As she pointed out in her investigations, it was about destroying the Black doctors, Black business owners to enforce the poverty and subjugation of a segregated South.

Ramparts, you mentioned Bob Scheer, again, Ramparts never made a dime, COINTELPRO and that photograph of the child running down the road being burned by napalm in Vietnam and all of this comes out in the alternative press. We used to have the Village Voice. We used to have a decentralized press, so there were far more alternative weeklies. It’s always been the independent media that has shamed or forced the commercial media to begrudgingly accept reality.

That’s been transferred to the digital age, and you hold up Consortium News and other sites that I respect, run by Joe Lauria, founded by Bob Perry. I knew Bob because I covered the Contra War in Nicaragua. And you’re right, that that is where the hope lies, but I think the hope has always been within the alternative media.

And you write about working for an alternative media publication which held these values, it was called The Guardian, if I remember. But we’re watching it play itself out now in the digital age. And we’re watching the heavy-handed state censorship move quite aggressively to crush it. I mean, I think that’s where we are.

I’m a little less hopeful than you are. I’m hopeful about the quality of the independent media and what can come out. But I think that the ferocity of the censorship is almost daily becoming more and more pronounced. And I speak as somebody who’s been deplatformed, demonetized, hit with algorithms and everything else.

Patrick Lawrence

Yes, I know. Well, a couple of points. I think of, first of all, in the book, I discard the term alternative media, right?

Chris Hedges

Yeah, you were right to do so.

Patrick Lawrence

Way back in my youth, I was foreign editor at The Guardian, The American Guardian, one of the wonderful experiments of 20th century journalism. It lost its way in sectarian nonsense. My argument now is that independent media should not understand itself, and nor should its readers and viewers, as an alternative to anything.

It should be an autonomous, freestanding set of institutions, publications, whatever, broadcasters, that find their own way, and they’re not qualifying what they read in the New York Times the previous day. I think that’s an important point, the independence in the true sense of the term.

Second point I want to make here is what we’re talking about, the way you and I are talking right now, I don’t know your technology intimately, it is dependent on these extraordinary digital technologies. That’s terrific. Look at the explosion in independent media. You don’t have to bother with newsprint anymore and all that sort of thing, right? It’s out there right away. But this is the weighty paradox of our time.

What has made independent media so extraordinarily effective over a very long period of time and make no mistake, the corporate press is quite concerned about the challenge with which they’ve been presented. But these same technologies leave us extremely vulnerable to being shut down, as you were saying, censored. They can pull the plug.

My reply to this, and I don’t wish to sound angelic or idealist, is think about the human commitment to renewed ideals evidenced in all the good people in independent media. That’s human intellectual commitment, career on the line sort of stuff. You might destroy the technology. Joe [Lauria] just got finished cleaning up this grotesque hack of the entire Consortium’s website. You might do that, but you’re not gonna destroy the spirit and commitment of the people doing this work. And it’s from that I draw a measure of optimism you may not share. Whatever happens, we’ll do this.

Chris Hedges

No, I share that. I mean, I think the digital media has given us a kind of reach that normally dissidents such as ourselves wouldn’t have, independent journalists. I remember, I.F. Stone began his weekly printing it off in his basement.

Patrick Lawrence

I thought it was his dining table.

Chris Hedges

Was it? I thought maybe it was his dining table. I don’t know. But look, it had… And he made the large journalistic institutions shake and quake because I think that circulation was never above 60,000, but it didn’t matter, it was who it reached.

Patrick Lawrence

I love this detail, who told us this? Who told this story? Wash Post reporters would be on the bus in DC with the Post in front of them and I.F, Stone’s Weekly inside. Fun.

Chris Hedges

I didn’t know that. That’s great. All right. Well, thanks so much. You were wonderful. I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Max [Jones], Thomas [Hedges], and Sofia [Menemenlis], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

https://scheerpost.com/2025/06/12/journalists-and-their-shadows-w-patrick-lawrence-the-chris-hedges-report/

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