Paul Patterson was born in 1878. He became the publisher of the Baltimore Sun. It has been argued by Jennet Conant, the author of The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington (2008) that Ernest Cuneo who worked for British Security Coordination, was "empowered to feed select British intelligence items about Nazi sympathizers and subversives" to friendly journalists who "were stealth operatives in their campaign against Britain's enemies in America". Cuneo also worked closely with editors and publishers who were supporters of American intervention into the Second World War. This included Patterson, Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Helen Rogers Reid (New York Herald Tribune), Henry Luce (Time Magazine and Life Magazine), Dorothy Schiff (New York Post) and Ralph Ingersoll (Picture Magazine).

H. L. Mencken , who was a regular contributor as well as being on the board of the Baltimore Sun, resigned in 1941 because of what he considered to be the newspaper's "wildly pro-British bias". He later recalled: "I told Patterson that, in my judgment, the English had found him an easy mark, and made a monkey out of him. He did not attempt to dispute the main fact." Mencken wrote in his diary in October 1945: "From the first to the last they (the newspapers owned by Patterson) were official organs and nothing more, and taking one day with another they were official organs of England rather than of the United States."

Paul Patterson died in 1952.