<nettime> Observing the Travels of Paul Mason

["d.garcia" <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk>]

Observing the Travels of Paul Mason

-My social networks followed me into the war and collided with others ? a 
reminder that warfare has become newly alive with information. The basic 
suite of tools journalists use has only been around six or seven years ? so 
Gaza is one of the earliest glimpses into how propaganda and truth might 
intersect in 21st-century warfare.- 

Paul Mason ? Guardian August 10th 2014

It is not primarily what someone says that determines its effect on the 
world it is who they are and the position they hold.

In the UK Paul Mason is one of the few (perhaps the only) mainstream 
journalist who has thought and wrote in any depth about the rise and the 
evolving character of protest movements since 2008 and he is certainly the only 
mainstream journalist to attempt to analyse the subterranean relationships 
between today?s media ecologies and the distinctive organizational and 
communicative structures of these movements. This fact alone makes his 
choices and career shifts interesting to Keep an eye on. He recently moved 
from the BBC?s News Night to Channel 4 where his role continues to be Economics 
Editor for Channel 4 News. Strange therefore that he is currently reporting as 
a quasi war correspondent from Gaza.

There is no info I can find on why he left the BBC?s flag ship news 
platform. Perhaps it was his own choice, giving him more freedom to work on 
his own left of centre books. Or maybe he was as seen as too biased and 
risky by the BBC, which (as always) is buffeted by controversy and political 
pressure. Certainly anyone who witnessed the unprecedented -on air- ticking 
off he received from Jeremy Paxman during his coverage of unrest in Athens 
might have felt that his days at the Beeb were numbered. But whatever the truth 
of the matter, we can be grateful that he appears to be contributing more 
frequently to the Guardian.

His most recent piece is this richly informative report from Gaza in which 
we get a rare insight into the range of (truly) tactical media being 
deployed by the citizen journalists on the ground and as usual he has 
managed to get up close and personal to these activist/journalists. 
But the article is also interesting in what it reveals of his own internal 
dialogue as his struggle (more visible in other articles) to assert 
the importance of a relatively independent standpoint in the midst 
of a war zone.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/10/truth-propaganda-foes-g 
aza-war-independent-journalism  

------------------------

d a v i d  g a r c i a
new-tactical-research.co.uk


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