This is the book I didn’t know I’d been waiting for. Having read most of Patrick Cockburn’s work on the Middle East, dispatches filled with lucidity, caution and moral weight, and his brother Alexander’s polemics on the American empire, it is deeply satisfying to see where it all began. Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied is, at one level, a biography of their father, Claud Cockburn. But it is also a study in political inheritance: how the instinct to disbelieve, to challenge, to resist—rather than to report, reframe, or recite—was forged in the 1930s and survives, in battered form, into our own.
Claud Cockburn stood up to power. Not metaphorically, not as an act of brand management, but concretely, in print. He launched The Week, a mimeographed scandal sheet written from a damp attic in London, with a borrowed £40 and more enemies than allies. It had no commercial prospects and no institutional shield. But it made the powerful flinch. Goebbels read it. So did Senator Borah. Hitler’s ambassador to London tried, twice, to have it banned. That Cockburn did all this without access, without advertising, without the smug backing of a broadsheet masthead, still startles.
Reading this biography in 2025 only sharpens the contrast. The White House Correspondents’ Association has just cancelled its comedian for the annual dinner—Amber Ruffin—for fear of offending the powerful. The Associated Press had to file a lawsuit just to regain access to the Oval Office. A journalist was hauled bodily out of Antony Blinken’s final press conference for daring to ask about Gaza. And The Washington Post, under Jeff Bezos, has seen its investigative grit blunted by billionaire management and strategic silence. What would Claud make of a press corps that genuflects, quite literally, at the same institutions it’s supposed to interrogate?
This, perhaps, is what makes Patrick Cockburn’s portrait of his father feel so urgent. The Week didn’t pretend to objectivity. It didn’t seek permission. It named names. It exposed the British establishment’s collusion with fascism, not with a pious tone or a PR-approved infographic, but with detail and anger. Claud had no time for the false neutrality that still dominates today’s newsrooms. He saw journalism not as balance, but as confrontation, not as a public service, but as a private war. “Believe nothing until it is officially denied” was not just a quip; it was a method.
Patrick’s own career, charting the West’s serial imperial catastrophes from Fallujah to Kabul, mirrors the lesson. He has seen, as his father did, that official lies are systemic, and that media complicity is not a failure but a function. His Iraq reporting exposed the hollowness of the WMD narrative; his coverage of Syria, Libya and Gaza showed again and again that the press, far from speaking truth to power, often amplifies its most grotesque deceptions.
The elder Cockburn understood this long before it was fashionable to say so. He left The Times at the height of his career because he could no longer stomach its drift into appeasement. He joined the Communist Party not out of naïveté, but because it seemed the only movement genuinely committed to fighting fascism. Later, disillusioned, he slipped away, quietly, without public break or public regret. He judged people not by party, but by what he called the Dreyfus Test: would they have defended the wrongly accused Jewish officer in fin-de-siècle France, or stood with the mob? For Claud, it was a more useful index than any modern electoral compass.
What emerges in this book, and what Patrick renders with generosity and rigour, is a kind of strategic defiance. Claud didn’t believe the powerless could always win. But he believed they could fight. “Battles are not always won by the big battalions,” he wrote, “that’s just propaganda from the generals.” Journalism, for him, was guerrilla warfare: hit hard, hit smart, expose the weak spots, and keep moving. The aim wasn’t to win in the abstract. It was to harass, unsettle, reveal, and in doing so, puncture the state’s performance of omnipotence.
Three insights endure. First, that journalism is always a form of selection, not revelation, what gets published reflects power, not truth. Second, that official narratives rely on complicity, and that complicity runs deep in liberal institutions. Third, that even now, in an age of managed information and media billionaires, resistance is not futile. Not easy, not glamorous, but possible.
We live, again, in an age of appeasement. This time, it’s Trump, Musk, the Saudis, the settlers, the surveillance state. The press, as in the 1930s, has largely chosen compliance. What Claud Cockburn offered, and what Patrick reminds us of, is that it doesn’t have to. That journalism, at its best, is not a dinner invitation or a press badge, but a sling-shot projectile. Small, and dangerous, if aimed right.
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