Norman Solomon
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Norman Solomon (1952 - ) is a Jewish American journalist and antiwar activist from Maryland who writes frequently about media and politics. His weekly column "Media Beat" has been in national syndication since 1992.
Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR). He is also the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts. While FAIR - of which Solomon was president in the mid-1990s - complains of lack of left views in the news, the Institute for Public Accuracy instead pro-actively provides alternative sources for journalists.
When Solomon was 14, because of his work with the Montgomery County Student Alliance activist group, he came under the scrutiny of the FBI. He became aware of their surveillance later, through a Freedom of Information request. In Portland, Oregon, he was an activist against nuclear power and nuclear weapons and was a researcher for the Committee for Veterans of Hiroshima.
In September 1984, Solomon served 10 days in jail for obstructing railroad tracks in Vancouver, Washington, to block a train carrying U.S. Department of Energy cargo bound for the U.S. Naval submarine base in Bangor, Washington. USNAVSUBASE Bangor was a home port for submarines armed with Trident D-5 missiles. At the time Solomon was "disarmament director" for the interfaith Fellowship of Reconciliation.
As a reporter working for the Pacific News Service and Pacifica Radio, Solomon made eight trips to Moscow during the 1980s. In February 1986, he and U.S. military veteran Anthony Guarisco engaged in a sit-in at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, demanding that the U.S. join the Soviet Union in a nuclear test ban. In 1988 Solomon began work as a spokesperon for the Alliance of Atomic Veterans in Washington, D.C. In August, 1988 Solomon was hired to run the new Washington, D.C. office of FAIR.
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[edit] Books
- War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (July 2005)
- Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (co-authored with Reese Erlich) (2003) Download at Coldtype as a free PDF download (691kb)
- The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media (1999)
- Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News (co-authored with Jeff Cohen) (1997)
- The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh (1997) This Book is Online
- Through the Media Looking Glass: Decoding Bias and Blather in the News (with Jeff Cohen) (1995)
- False Hope: The Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era (1994)
- Adventures in Medialand: Behind the News, Beyond the Pundits (with Jeff Cohen) (1993)
- The Power of Babble: The Politician's Dictionary of Buzzwords and Doubletalk for Every Occasion (1992)
- Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (co-authored with Martin A. Lee) (1990)
- Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience With Atomic Radiation (co-authored with Harvey Wasserman (1982) This Book is Online
[edit] Writings
- Media Beat Columns
- Past Media Beat columns on Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) site.
- Coldtype has Solomon's Media Beat columns from 2003-today online as PDFs, plus columns from August to December 2002 collected in PDF form as The Media Marches to War.
