Telepopulism: Media and Politics in Israel, Yoram Peri, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 376.

This is an ambitious work that does not achieve all that it sets out to do but is nevertheless stimulating and provocative. Peri tries to combine a general summary of the literature on media and politics in a rapidly changing technological environment with an application to the Israeli political system and a detailed analysis of how the government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (1996–1999) fits into the picture. It appears that Peri's views on his general subject have been greatly affected by his observations during the Netanyahu years. Indeed he sees that prime minister as the quintessential practitioner of media-centred politics on the Israeli scene.