Author: Norman Solomon

Many politicians and pundits have told us that “Iraq is not Vietnam.” Certainly, any competent geographer would agree. Substantively, the histories of Iraq and Vietnam are very different. And the dynamics of U.S. military intervention in the two countries — while more similar than the American news media generally acknowledge — are far from identical.…

More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she’s facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday — a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus…

This month we’ve heard a lot of talk about journalists who got tough with President Bush. And it’s true that he has been on the receiving end of some fiercely negative media coverage in the wake of the hurricane. But the mainstream U.S. press is ill-suited to challenging the legitimacy of the Bush administration. The…

Traveling from New York City in late September 2001, on a pre-scheduled book tour, author Joan Didion spoke with audiences in several cities on the West Coast. In the wake of 9/11, she later wrote, “these people to whom I was listening — in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Portland and Seattle — were…

For President Bush, a classic political question — “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” — must be answered with a resounding “No.” In 2001, within days of 9/11, mass media touted Bush as a walking FDR and hailed him as the nation’s visionary leader. The president settled into a jerky…