Norman Solomon

Buying the War: Billl Moyers Journal

Buying the War, the 90 minute special debut of Bill Moyers Journal, examined media coverage of the Iraq War.  Norman Solomon was interviewed in the program.  A transcript and video of the entire program are online.

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BILL MOYERS: It had now become unfashionable to dissent from the official line — Unfashionable and risky.

BILL O'REILLY: (Fox 2/26/03) Anyone who hurts this country in a time like this. Well let's just say you will be spotlighted

NORM SOLOMON: If you're a journalist or a politician, and you're swimming upstream-- so to speak-- you're gonna encounter a lot of piranha, and they are voracious. There's a notion that this is the person that we go after this week.

ERIC BOEHLERT: Fox news and-- and talk radio and the Conservative bloggers. I mean, they were bangin' those drums very loud. And-- and, everyone in the press could hear it. -- not only was it just liberal bias, it was an anti-American bias, an unpatriotic bias and that these journalists were really not part of America.

DAN RATHER: And every journalist knew it. They had and they have a very effective slam machine. The way it works is you either report the news the way we want it reported or we're going to hang a sign around your neck.

BILL O'REILLY (2/27/03):  I will call those who publicly criticize their country in a time of military crisis, which this is, bad Americans.

Bowing Down to Our Own Violence

Several days after the mass killings at Virginia Tech, grisly stories about the tragedy still dominate front pages and cable television. News of carnage on a vastly larger scale — the war in Iraq — ebbs and flows. The overall coverage of lethal violence, at home and far away, reflects the chronic evasions of the American media establishment.

In the world of U.S. mainline journalism, the boilerplate legitimacy of official American violence overseas is a routine assumption.

“The first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence,” George Will wrote three years ago in the Washington Post. But now, his latest Newsweek column laments: “Vietnam produced an antiwar movement in America; Iraq has produced an antiwar America.”

Current polls and public discourse — in spite of media inclinations to tamp down authentic anger at the war — do reflect an “antiwar America” of sorts. So, why is the ghastly war effort continuing unabated? A big factor is the undue respect that’s reserved for American warriors in American society.

When a mentally unstable person goes on a shooting rampage in the United States, no one questions that such actions are intrinsically, fundamentally and absolutely wrong. The media condemnation is 100 percent...

Read the full column.

Awful Truth About Hillary, Barack, John… and Whitewash

The Pentagon’s most likely next target is Iran. Hillary Clinton says “no option can be taken off the table.”

Barack Obama says that the Iranian government is “a threat to all of us” and “we should take no option, including military action, off the table.”

John Edwards says, “Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons.” And: “We need to keep all options on the table.”

A year ago, writing in The New Yorker, journalist Seymour Hersh reported... Read the full column.

Marketing War

Last month, I had the pleasure of chatting with media critic Norman Solomon at the Pine Cone Diner near his home in Point Reyes Station. We exchanged pleasantries about how lucky we are to be living in the ecologically buxom North Bay. Then we got down to discussing the matter at hand: exactly how our federal government uses public-relations techniques to sell state-sanctioned murder and war-for-profit to the American people decade after decade after decade...

Read the full article by Peter Byrne from the North Bay Bohemian (April 11-17, 2007).

The Martin Luther King You Don’t See on TV

by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

It’s become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King’s death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King’s life is that several years – his last years – are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn’t take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they’re not shown today on TV.

Why? It’s because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years...

Read the full column.

Ruben Salazar Journalism Award speech

Norman Solomon received the Annual Ruben Salazar Journalism Award for 2007. The award "honors the memory of independent journalist Ruben Salazar, who was killed during a Vietnam War protest in East Los Angeles when he was hit in the head by a police tear gas canister. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and cohost Juan Gonzalez are previous award winners."

An MP3 of the speech he gave is online.

While McCain Walks in McNamara’s Footsteps

The media spectacle that John McCain made of himself in Baghdad on Sunday was yet another reprise of a ghastly ritual. Senator McCain expressed “very cautious optimism” and told reporters that the latest version of the U.S. war effort in Iraq is “making progress.” Three years ago, in early April 2004, when an insurrection exploded in numerous Iraqi cities, U.S. occupation spokesman Dan Senor informed journalists: “We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems.” Nine days later, President Bush declared: “It’s not a popular uprising. Most of Iraq is relatively stable.”

For government officials committed to a war based on lies, such claims are in the wiring...

Read the full column.