How conglomerates corrupt the Indian media landscape HARTOSH SINGH BAL The Adani Group’s attempted takeover of NDTV this year sparked intense speculation about the future of the broadcaster and the effect it would have on Indian media. The multinational conglomerate, founded by the billionaire Gautam Adani, has already established a presence in media by investing… Read More Private Interest Journalism
First posted July 10, 2013 Cracks in the Kremlin matrixPeter Pomerantsev enters the matrix of managed democracy that underpins postmodern dictatorship in Russia. A society of pure spectacle, with fake parties, fake opposition, fake scandals and fake action: this is the political technologists’ project, in which (almost) everything becomes PR. NB – the articles below provide insights… Read More Cracks in the Kremlin matrix. The Stalinist order, the Putinist order; Russia’s culture of bureaucratic corruption
This equaling out of truth and falsehood is both informed by and takes advantage of an all-permeating late post-modernism and relativism, which has trickled down over the past thirty years from academia to the media and then everywhere else. This school of thought has taken Nietzsche’s maxim, there are no facts, only interpretations, to mean… Read More Farewell to reality: Why we’re post-fact
Volodymyr Kadygrob Anton Tarasyuk Despite the bizarre and evidently distorted reality conjured by Putin’s media strategists, their propaganda has proved considerably effective even outside Russia. Not in the sense that many people in Europe believe in the Russian message. From a European perspective, Russian propaganda consists of nothing more than blatant lies and deliberate disinformation.… Read More When reality hits the propaganda machine
Renowned Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, who currently lives in Portugal with his Chinese wife and their child, sees China‘s reaction to the pandemic over the past three years as the “most stringent constraints on human behavior in Chinese history and in human history,” which are restricting human rights and personal autonomy, he told DW in an email interview.… Read More Ai Weiwei on China’s protests
NB: Here’s my post on the same theme some months ago. DS Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, whose critical remarks on ‘The Kashmir Files’ movie at a film festival have raised a storm, has stood by them and said “someone has to speak up”. Mr Lapid, the head of the international jury at the International Film… Read More ‘The Kashmir Files’ Has Fascist Features: Israeli Filmmaker doubles down. ‘Someone has to speak up’
“We strongly condemn child abuse; it was never our intent to include it in our narrative.” Please just take a moment to note how – even in the face of a full-spectrum paedo panic – Balenciaga cannot bring itself to relinquish some pretentious wank about “our narrative”. “It was never our intent to include child… Read More At last, a Kardashian has spoken: those Balenciaga bears should never have worn bondage gear
NB: Jail without trial for 4 years and counting. Stan Swamy died in custody, without interrogation or a trial. This is Indian justice today under the BJP-RSS government, a political group that weeps crocodile tears about the victims of the 1974 Emergency. They also criticize the retention of colonial era education and justice. Preventive detention… Read More A Professor’s Supreme Court Bail Hearing Is A Bellwether Case For Govt’s Use of India’s Anti-Terror Law
Final immersion ceremony of the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi at Allahabad on February 12, 1948. Credit: Photo Division, GOI Pavan Kulkarni Five months after India’s independence, on January 14, 1948, three members of the Hindu Mahasabha – Nathuram Godse, Narayan Apte and Digambar Badge, an arms dealer regularly selling weapons to the Mahasabha – arrived… Read More How Savarkar Escaped Conviction For Gandhi’s Assassination
Bidisha Mamata Last month, Elon Musk walked into Twitter and then all the good people left. I quit, too. It was a time-sink, a brain drain and an eye strain. In 12 years, I gained nothing, while witnessing peers and colleagues at their worst. Oh, the bliss of not turning every little thing into a quip. The… Read More I too quit Twitter this week – and have never been more relieved
After the truth-shower 