Author: Norman Solomon

At the moment, history seems to be holding its breath. The reporters, pundits and pollsters all agree: The presidential race is a dead heat. Despite the magnitude of what’s at stake, the vast majority of daily reporting has a fragmented quality. Yet the sum is immensely greater than the parts. Journalism is potentially a terrific…

“There He Is, Mr. America…” Less than two weeks before Election Day 2004, the ABC television network cancelled Miss America. Fifty years after it premiered on national TV, the famous “beauty pageant” has fallen on hard times. Last month, the annual show drew just 9.8 million viewers, the smallest audience ever. “The pageant has changed,…

Soon after the American death toll in Iraq passed the 1,000 mark, I thought of Saadoun Hammadi and some oratory he provided two years ago. At the time, Hammadi was the speaker of Iraq’s National Assembly. “The U.S. administration is now speaking war,” Hammadi said. “We are not going to turn the other cheek. We…

I just saw a horror movie — “Bush’s Brain” — the new documentary based on a book with the same name by journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater. The book’s subtitle is “How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential.” I’ll spare you the grim details. What matters most now is that Rove’s long record…

“Happy is the country which requires no heroes,” Bertolt Brecht commented. Today, by that standard, the United States is a very unhappy country. These days, the public’s genuine eagerness for heroes is difficult to gauge. If media output is any measure, the hero industry is engaged in massive overproduction. Whether the “products” are entertainers, star…