A ‘Worthless and Whiny’ Attack on a Genuine Journalistic Hero
The Washington Post was one of the major newspapers to attack Gary Webb for his revelations about the CIA-backed Contras and the crack epidemic. It’s 2014, and they’re still at it.
Audio: Gary Webb on ‘Dark Alliance,’ CIA and Drugs
A CounterSpin special broadcast about Gary Webb’s reporting featured excerpts from a talk by Webb, along with an interview with Norman Solomon discussing inaccuracies and distortions in establishment media attacks on Webb.
Heritage Foundation: Where Have All the Scholars Gone?
Is the Heritage Foundation really drifting away from its scholarly roots–or has it always been more of a corporate-funded right-wing lobby?
Norman Solomon on Iraq War Ten Years Ago, Richard Kim on Ed Koch
This week on CounterSpin: “Irrefutable” was the headline on the Washington Post editorial responding to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s UN presentation making the case for war on Iraq. That was ten years ago this week; we’ll talk with author and activist Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org about how much difference there is between then and now.
Also on the show: Reading the eulogies for late New York City mayor Ed Koch, you’d think he was a universally loved figure. But for the not so adoring, Koch is remembered as an antagonist of ethnic minorities who presided over massive corruption and failed to adequately confront the emerging HIV/AIDS pandemic. We’ll explore how Koch dealt with the pandemic with Nation editor Richard Kim.
The Martin Luther King You Still Don’t See on TV
As we approach the Monday holiday, we’re hearinga Pentagon lawyer suggest that Martin Luther King would support the war in Afghanistan. That makes it an ideal time torecall a 1995 column by FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and longtime associate Norman Solomon (Media Beat, 1/4/95). The full column appearsbelow, and is archived here. The Martin Luther […]
‘War-Stoking Mindset Is Replicating’ in Big Media
Of deteriorating governmental control in Afghanistan, Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 9/8/09) says that “a stale witticism calls Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai ‘the mayor of Kabul.’ Now, not even.” He points to the “corrupt, inept and–with massive election fraud–now illegitimate” administration as a “notable work product” of “those who believe in making war”: After 30 years, […]
Corporate Media ‘Default Position’: ‘War Must Go On’
Media Monitors Network has the latest column from Norman Solomon (8/26/09), in which the longtime analyst of corporate media boosterism for U.S. wars considers a recent swath of stories that “have compared President Johnson’s war in Vietnam and President Obama’s war in Afghanistan.” True, “the comparisons are often valid,” Solomon finds, “but a key parallel […]
Media’s Afghan ‘Metrics’ Exclude ‘Value of Human Life’
As “official Washington is buzzing about ‘metrics’” of success in the U.S. war on Afghanistan, Norman Solomon (ZNet, 8/13/09) notes of media’s persistent question, “Can the war in Afghanistan be successful?”–“Don’t ask the dead”: On August 7, under the headline “White House Struggles to Gauge Afghan Success,” a New York Times story made a splash. […]
Sands of Healthcare Truth Beneath ‘Oceans of Media’
Noticing that “days ago, buried in a chart under the headline “How the Health Care Bills Compare,” the New York Times provided some cogent yet cryptic information,” Norman Solomon (Guernica, 7/23/09) has done some valuable decoding of a Senate committee bill’s “public plan that would ‘compete with private insurers,’” as “the Times chart explained on […]
On Cronkite as (Belatedly) ‘Courageous Truth-Teller’
Norman Solomon has noticed (Common Dreams, 7/20/09) that “media eulogies for Walter Cronkite–including from progressive commentators–rarely talk about his coverage of the Vietnam War before 1968.” An “obit omit” Solomon deems “essential to the myth of Cronkite as a courageous truth-teller”: But facts are facts, and history is history–including what Cronkite actually did as TV’s […]
Big Media Push Escalation in Afghanistan and at Home
Noting how “the president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now,” FAIR associate Norman Solomon is letting Huffington Post readers know (7/9/09) “that’s how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually”: A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. […]
Big Media ‘Lenses…Ground With Ideology, Nationalism’
Noticing that “the New York Times used three square inches of newsprint on Tuesday to dispatch two U.S. Army soldiers under the headline ‘Names of the Dead,’” Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 7/1/09) points out how apparently “there wasn’t enough room for any numbers, names or ages of Afghans who have died as a part of […]
How ‘Adulatory News Coverage’ Impedes Democracy
Norman Solomon uses his most recent Creators Syndicate column (6/19/09) to call for journalism that “is open scrutiny of the dynamics of power. Reporters should shine a bright light on behind-the-scenes maneuvers that block congressional oversight of administration policies”: Last Tuesday, when the House of Representatives approved a supplemental spending bill for more war in […]
If It Bleeds, It (Sometimes) Leads
Looking beyond “the yellow-tape segments that bleed and lead local TV news” Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 6/13/09) discerns what he dubs “Media’s Love/Hate Affair with Violence”–as exemplified by the kind of violence–rarely occurring in the light of day–that gets scant media attention. With somewhere around 2 million people behind bars in the United States, all […]
On the WaPo’s ‘Tacit Faith in Massive Violence’
Writing that “it takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation,” FAIR associate Norman Solomon (Huffington Post, 6/8/09) tells us that, when last Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post printed the routine headline “Iraq War Deaths,” […]
The Sham That Is ‘Objective’ Corporate Journalism
In a Consortium News rejoinder (4/30/09) to how “mainstream U.S. news media often laments the decline of objective journalism, pointing disapprovingly at the more subjective news that comes from the Internet or from ideological programming,” Robert Parry writes that one could argue that the U.S. mainstream press has inflicted the severest damage to the concept […]
MSM: Pioneers in Selective Memory
Norman Solomon is unable to resist the irony (Huffington Post, 4/11/09) of a lead New York Times article titled “Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory,” inverting the futuristic character of news that scientists possibly “could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain” to look back on how “American media […]
Self-Censorship Trumps Official Censorship
FAIR associate Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 2/14/09) tells why he’s concerned the potential lifting of the government ban on press photography of war casualties’ coffins isn’t “particularly good news”: I wrote in my book War Made Easy that ambiguity is part of the process that we bring to the media-consuming table: “Visual images may be […]
Joan Didion and the ‘War to End Peace’
Norman Solomon’s latest column (Creators Syndicate, 1/31/09) looks over a decade in which “the false truism of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction led to the horrors of the Iraq invasion and occupation,” and “in the wake of 9/11, overall, the main journalistic outlets of the United States fed us falsehoods, hysteria, self-righteousness and endless […]
Pundits ‘Nod Sagely’ at Madness of War
A January 23 New York Times column by Bob Herbert distilled the message of Barack Obama’s nascent administration as “No more crazy wars.” FAIR associate Norman Solomon’s reaction (AfterDowningStreet.org, 1/26/09): “I wish.” Lamenting the current “narrowness of political vision–while news outlets are reporting that the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is expected to ‘as […]
