Journalist A. J. Liebling famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Today, in a world dominated by corporate capitalism — including subservient politicians and careerists — the press’s freedom has been eroded to mere margins. Journalist and writer Patrick Lawrence joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to chronicle the decline of journalism, which he details in his book, Journalists and Their Shadows.

Lawrence defines what a journalist is meant to do and be, a definition he attributes to John Dewey. A journalist “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.”

This is no longer the case. “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,” Lawrence explains. Drawing on examples of reporting from the Vietnam War up until the Iraq War and even the current war in Ukraine, Lawrence dives into how the views from the State Department became the views of the press and anybody who differed from that would be cast out.

Lawrence points to psychological disruptions within journalists as a result of the nature of their work as part of the reason why the press has deteriorated. “The corruptions in the press begin with the corruptions of the personalities who want to get paid, want to be promoted, and so on,” he says.

Instead of employing the Socratic process of reasoning, mainstream journalists today have agendas they must serve. “[Reasoning] has been turned upside down in our hyper-ideological polity such that you draw your conclusion first and then you reason backwards,” Lawrence declares.

There are few pieces of literature that remain as prescient and relevant throughout history as John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Thomas Jefferson, Malcolm X, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Paine and dozens more drew inspiration from and studied Milton’s grand work and the revolutionary themes within it.

Professor Orlando Reade, in his book, What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost, examines the epic poem’s influence in the four centuries since its publication and joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss this history.

Reade begins with the historical context of the poem, which was after the seventeenth century English revolution that overthrew the monarchy. Milton’s work, Reade and Hedges explain, embodies critiques of both monarchy and revolution.

“The reader is presented with a figure of Satan that seems a lot like Milton himself, a failed revolutionary recovering from a disastrous defeat and often articulating arguments against God, who Satan calls a tyrant, that Milton himself had made against the English King,” Reade explains. “So the great mystery of Paradise Lost is trying to figure out why Milton gives us a Satan that seems so much like himself.”

The historical parallels found within Paradise Lost clearly resonate with figures in history, especially those in the struggle for freedom and abolition. Reade emphasizes how many times the poem is referenced throughout this history.

“This is not an epic poem that spends much time celebrating the heroic deeds of men. It's not a macho poem. It's a poem for which the most heroic acts are true to the New Testament. They're humble and often quiet acts of love, of forgiveness, and so on,” he says.

The narratives surrounding Israel and their genocidal campaign against the Palestinians took decades to create and embed into the West’s psyche. The Holocaust, decades after its end, became a central part of the Jewish and Israeli identity. Enemies of the Israeli state were conflated with Nazis. The physical location of Israel became essential to Christian evangelicals who believe the second coming of Jesus Christ was to take place there.

The late Amy Kaplan, in her book, Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance, explored how these narratives developed through popular culture and the media’s reporting on the Israeli government’s actions throughout the 20th century, particularly in the United States. Professor Joan Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and adjunct professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss Kaplan’s book and how prevalent it is in the face of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

“Part of the invincible victim story is that Jews have to always be alert about defending themselves against any sign that the Holocaust is about to reappear and then attribute it to Palestinians, the possibility that they will bring another Holocaust,” Scott says. “So the whole defense industry of Israel, the whole occupation of Gaza and the West Bank become a way of arguing against the possibility of another Holocaust.”

When it comes to Christian Zionism, Scott explains that cynicism in the Israeli government tolerates the antisemites within these groups “because they're bringing a large sector of the American population, a powerfully politically influential sector of the American population, certainly now with Trump, to support the activities that Israel is engaging in.”