DUDAMEL DETAINED; COPY EDITOR ABSENT

posted by James Reel

Getting legitimate foreign artists into the United States and Great Britain has been ridiculously difficult during the past decade of paranoia, and now even Israel is getting into the act of impeding the travel of well-known musicians. According to this report, conductor Gustavo Dudamel was recently detained while entering and exiting Israel. But there's a suggestion that the harassment stems from Dudamel's Venezuelan citizenship, and Israeli officials hate Venezuela because Venezuela is cozy with Iran, which Israeli officials also hate. Read the blog post and follow its internal link for more on the conspiracy theory, but while you do that, pause to wonder if the Los Angeles Times bothers to copyedit its bloggers. This fellow twice refers to the "Israeli" Philharmonic (it's Israel Philharmonic, which he at least gets right in a quote), and Norman Lebrecht's name is not spelled "LeBrecht." I do wish newspapers would take as much responsibility for their blog posts as they do for print articles, and for that matter police their comments sections as carefully as they do published letters to the editor.