How To Be A Foreign Correspondent Without Swallowing Propaganda - interview with Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, about his decades as a foreign correspondent

Current Affairs

Patrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent for The Independent for over 30 years and has become known for his combination of a deep knowledge of the region and a healthy skepticism toward the propaganda of governments. His books The Age of Jihad (Verso) and War In The Age of Trump (OR Books) collect his extraordinary on-the-ground dispatches from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in the decades since 9/11 and provide a rich understanding of the devastating wars of the last years, filled with the perspectives of the ordinary people trying to survive these conflicts. When Foreign Affairs awarded Cockburn its Journalist of the Year award, the contest judges said of his work:

“Patrick Cockburn spotted the emergence of ISIS much earlier than anybody else and wrote about it with a depth of understanding that was just in a league of its own. Nobody else was writing that stuff at that time, and the judges wondered whether the Government should consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead. The breadth of his knowledge and his ability make connections is phenomenal.”

In this episode, we discuss what Cockburn has learned during his decades as a foreign correspondent about how to sift through competing narratives and arrive at something approximating the truth. We talk about how propaganda works, what Americans still don't understand about the Middle East, and why the quality of reporting on regional conflicts has declined over the last decades as news organizations have stopped providing necessary support for deep critical journalism. We also discuss the reissue of Cockburn's memoir The Broken Boy (OR Books), about his childhood during the Cork polio epidemic of 1956, which like his other work is a story of everyday people who find themselves caught up in the tides of history and having to struggle through as best they can.

(The title of this episode refers to a 1976 essay by Cockburn's late brother Alexander, "How To Be a Foreign Correspondent," which skewered the kinds of hack war reporters that Patrick Cockburn has spent a career trying to be different from.)