Journalists and Their Shadows
Part memoir, part social history, Journalists and Their Shadows captures the deplorable state of the American media in our time—recording its deterioration, its moments of crisis and ultimately, its transformation as seen through the eyes of a journalist engaged at its very heart through all its phases. The press had a bad Cold War, Patrick Lawrence contends, and never recovered from it, having never acknowledged its errors and so unable to learn from them. Its dysfunctional relationship with the national security state today is strikingly reminiscent of how it was in the Cold War’s earliest days. With remarkable fidelity, all the old errors are being repeated.
As a result, the mainstream American media have entered into a period of profound transformation, in the course of which independent media are emerging as the profession’s most dynamic sector—and represent, indeed, the promise of a brilliant future.
A weave of three elements, Lawrence’s book offers a searing cultural and political critique, punctuated by the kind of piquant detail only insiders can provide. He also makes the case for a way forward—an optimistic case based on the vitality now apparent among independent media. Here, too, he is at home, providing the book’s most original coverage of this brave new world. He draws upon many years in the profession, a multitude of mainstream outlets ranging from his decades as foreign correspondent for the venerable International Herald Tribune to his work now as a columnist for a similar wide range of alternative news outlets such as Counterpunch, Consortium News et al.
Shadows probes the psychological dilemma that must be understood if we are to address the current crisis. Journalists in our time are divided within themselves—driven to meet thoroughly professional but ideologically conformist standards, but on the other, subliminally struggling to breach the barriers that preclude the truths they know should be conveyed. This latter, as Jung has put it, is the journalist’s shadow. Shadows’ case for the reintegration of the divided journalist is striking and original.
This record of the American media’s increasingly shabby betrayal of the public trust sheds light on why the American public thought and thinks the way it does, how it has become aware that the truth it seeks is absent, and where and how it may yet be able to ferret it out. Here is a guide to the future, in fact, of journalism itself
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Journalists and Their Shadows
Part memoir, part social history, Journalists and Their Shadows captures the deplorable state of the American media in our time—recording its deterioration, its moments of crisis and ultimately, its transformation as seen through the eyes of a journalist engaged at its very heart through all its phases. The press had a bad Cold War, Patrick Lawrence contends, and never recovered from it, having never acknowledged its errors and so unable to learn from them. Its dysfunctional relationship with the national security state today is strikingly reminiscent of how it was in the Cold War’s earliest days. With remarkable fidelity, all the old errors are being repeated.
As a result, the mainstream American media have entered into a period of profound transformation, in the course of which independent media are emerging as the profession’s most dynamic sector—and represent, indeed, the promise of a brilliant future.
A weave of three elements, Lawrence’s book offers a searing cultural and political critique, punctuated by the kind of piquant detail only insiders can provide. He also makes the case for a way forward—an optimistic case based on the vitality now apparent among independent media. Here, too, he is at home, providing the book’s most original coverage of this brave new world. He draws upon many years in the profession, a multitude of mainstream outlets ranging from his decades as foreign correspondent for the venerable International Herald Tribune to his work now as a columnist for a similar wide range of alternative news outlets such as Counterpunch, Consortium News et al.
Shadows probes the psychological dilemma that must be understood if we are to address the current crisis. Journalists in our time are divided within themselves—driven to meet thoroughly professional but ideologically conformist standards, but on the other, subliminally struggling to breach the barriers that preclude the truths they know should be conveyed. This latter, as Jung has put it, is the journalist’s shadow. Shadows’ case for the reintegration of the divided journalist is striking and original.
This record of the American media’s increasingly shabby betrayal of the public trust sheds light on why the American public thought and thinks the way it does, how it has become aware that the truth it seeks is absent, and where and how it may yet be able to ferret it out. Here is a guide to the future, in fact, of journalism itself
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Journalists and Their Shadows

Journalists and Their Shadows

by Patrick Lawrence
Journalists and Their Shadows

Journalists and Their Shadows

by Patrick Lawrence

Overview

Part memoir, part social history, Journalists and Their Shadows captures the deplorable state of the American media in our time—recording its deterioration, its moments of crisis and ultimately, its transformation as seen through the eyes of a journalist engaged at its very heart through all its phases. The press had a bad Cold War, Patrick Lawrence contends, and never recovered from it, having never acknowledged its errors and so unable to learn from them. Its dysfunctional relationship with the national security state today is strikingly reminiscent of how it was in the Cold War’s earliest days. With remarkable fidelity, all the old errors are being repeated.
As a result, the mainstream American media have entered into a period of profound transformation, in the course of which independent media are emerging as the profession’s most dynamic sector—and represent, indeed, the promise of a brilliant future.
A weave of three elements, Lawrence’s book offers a searing cultural and political critique, punctuated by the kind of piquant detail only insiders can provide. He also makes the case for a way forward—an optimistic case based on the vitality now apparent among independent media. Here, too, he is at home, providing the book’s most original coverage of this brave new world. He draws upon many years in the profession, a multitude of mainstream outlets ranging from his decades as foreign correspondent for the venerable International Herald Tribune to his work now as a columnist for a similar wide range of alternative news outlets such as Counterpunch, Consortium News et al.
Shadows probes the psychological dilemma that must be understood if we are to address the current crisis. Journalists in our time are divided within themselves—driven to meet thoroughly professional but ideologically conformist standards, but on the other, subliminally struggling to breach the barriers that preclude the truths they know should be conveyed. This latter, as Jung has put it, is the journalist’s shadow. Shadows’ case for the reintegration of the divided journalist is striking and original.
This record of the American media’s increasingly shabby betrayal of the public trust sheds light on why the American public thought and thinks the way it does, how it has become aware that the truth it seeks is absent, and where and how it may yet be able to ferret it out. Here is a guide to the future, in fact, of journalism itself

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781949762785
Publisher: Clarity Press, Incorporated
Publication date: 10/01/2023
Pages: 160
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Patrick Lawrence is an author, essayist, and lecturer. He was previously a correspondent abroad for International Herald Tribune. He now writes foreign affairs commentary for a variety of publications. His previous books include Japan: A Reinterpretation (Pantheon; NYT Notable Book, Overseas Press Club Award), Somebody Else’s Century: East and West in a Post–Western World (Pantheon; a Globalist Top 10 Book), and Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century (Yale; a Globalist Top 10 Book, L.A. Book Festival, honorable mention).

Read an Excerpt

WHEN WE LOOK BACK NOW on the excesses of the Cold War decades— those few of us inclined to look back—it is commonly with some combination of contempt and derision. Or we simply marvel, without wondering why, at the spectacle of a nation tipped inexplicably into a terrible foolishness. Joe McCarthy’s anti–Communist inquisitions, the fallout shelters and civil-defense drills, the loyalty oaths and compulsive patriotism, the blacklists: We presume that we hold the wisdom of the decades as we consider those intemperate times: the past was evil but the evil has passed; they did things differently back then.
I lived through the Cold War but for its very first years, and my memories remain vivid. It is the hysteria in the press and over the broadcast waves that lingers most in my mind. These things have left scars that do not fade with time, and in this I cannot be alone. This hysteria was at its highest pitch during the nineteen fifties and some of the sixties. The major dailies and the broadcasters gave that time its texture and timbre. They delivered the Cold War to our doorsteps, to our car radios, into our living rooms. They defined our 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 last seventy-five years of American history.
I do not think, and haven’t for a long time thought, that we have any ground to recall our media’s Cold War derelictions from a position of distanced superiority—as if its current state has significantly improved since then. To the contrary. Our press and broadcasters remain in crisis, and it is startling to find how faithfully they repeat the lapses and betrayals of those earlier decades. From Jefferson’s day to ours it has been well understood that a democratic polity requires an informed public and an informed public requires a vital and genuinely free press. We no more have such a press now than we had one during the worst of the Cold War years. Many Americans, still possessed of the need to believe they have

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