War Made Easy

Norman Solomon

Saturday, October 1st
3-5pm, UCSB MultiCultural Center
7:30-9:30pm, Faulkner Gallery, Santa Barbara Central Library (
UCTV Broadcast

Norman Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accguracy.org), a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts. He is a longtime associate of the media watch group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting; www.fair.org), and senior advisor to the National Radio Project (www.radioproject.org), which produces the weekly public-affairs program Making Contact, heard on 160 noncommercial radio stations in North America.

Solomon’s books include Target Iraq; Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News; The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh; False Hope: The Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era; The Power of Babble: The Politician's Dictionary of Buzzwords and Doubletalk for Every Occasion; Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media; Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience With Atomic Radiation; and Through the Media Looking Glass. Solomon's new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death was published in early summer 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, which describes the book this way: "Many people were appalled by the Bush administration’s blatant propagandizing in the run-up to the Iraq war. But what they don’t realize, according to media critic Norman Solomon, is that pro-war propaganda has a long history and almost formulaic quality in the United States. From Vietnam to Iraq, American combat-ready spin has almost invariably compared our foe to Hitler, identified our enemy as the aggressor, and said that we were doing everything possible diplomatically to avoid conflict. With this illuminating book, readers will find it easier to see through propaganda -- and foresee the next war."

Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist on media and politics. His weekly column "Media Beat" has been in national syndication since 1992. Solomon has appeared as a guest on many media outlets including the PBS “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” CNN, MSNBC, Fox News Channel, C-SPAN, public radio’s “Marketplace,” and NPR’s “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition” and “Talk of the Nation”, BBC Radio World Service, CBC Radio, CBC Television, Voice America, Al-Jazeera Television, Australia’s ABC television and radio, radio outlets in Ireland and South Africa, and SBS radio networks. Solomon’s op-ed articles have appeared in a range of newspapers including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, New York Times, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, USA Today, Philadelphia Inquirer and Baltimore Sun. His articles have also appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Canada’s Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the Jordan Times. For more details, see his website at http://www.normansolomon.com.

Sponsored by:
91.9 KCSB and the Center for Film, Television, and New Media

Additional sponsors:
The Multicultural Center; New Racial Studies Project; Center for Creativity and Innovation; Department of Sociology; Hani Sadeq Endowment/Department of Religious Studies; and The Book Den.

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