PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
Loneliness of the Long Distance Propagandist
A remarkable discussion has taken place on Meccsa, an academic mailing list for media, communications and cultural studies, sparked off by my previous blog, Behind the News from Gaza. With more than 150 messages in three days, very little of it had anything to do with what I actually wrote, and I’ve no complaint about that—it’s just one of the dynamics at work on the internet, and that’s what made it so interesting. The discussion was kicked off almost immediately by a doubting response from a list member in Israel, which gave me the feeling that she hadn’t read the full blog on Putney Debater but reacted impulsively to the snippet which appeared on the list. Thirty-six messages later, a correspondent posted the information that Elina Bardach-Yalov is listed on Linked In as a former Political Communications advisor for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Read more
Behind the News from Gaza
When the issues become too sharp and the contradictions too blatant, the news media are severely challenged to contain them within normal bounds. They generally try to keep stories apart in order not to have them contaminate each other, but just recently this became impossible. The events in Gaza and Ukraine are not directly connected, yet in the mediasphere they became coupled by their coincidence in time and their jostling day by day for the top story slot. As a result, it was impossible not to see, for example, the shameless hypocrisy of the British Prime Minister berating France for selling warships to Russia while everyone’s military support for Israel continues unabated. In Britain’s case, it has emerged that the value of all British military exports to Israel currently being processed stands at £7.9 billion, including a single deal last year worth more than £7.7 billion for cryptographic technology. Read more
Repeated Takes Revisited
For readers of my book on the history of recording, Repeated Takes, a musician blogger in North Carolina, John H. Davis, has recently posted a set of photos and video clips to go with the book. Kudos.
