Customer Reviews

The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in Mainstream News

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Solomon's The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media is a collection of juicy columns full of facts and quotes exposing how the mainstream media's lack of fair, complete, and unbiased reporting has become a major limiting factor for our democracy. He particularly addresses the consolidation of media power, the myth that liberalism dominates the media, and how the mass media has become little more than a public relations industry for the rich and powerful. Solomon realizes that access to information from all spectrums is a fundamental part of a healthy democracy; he raises this and many other issues virtually never covered in mainstream news. The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media is an extremely important book for all those who desire a clear vision of how the corporate media system works. Excellent book.

Solomon, a media analyst with a finely-tuned and raging impatience with mealy-mouthed, corporate-dominated reporting, is the definition of an "anti-pundit." His book punctures the phony, puny-minded pablum that passes for mainstream news. The book starts off with a great satire of what the TV news would look like "if anchors talked straight." Solomon stays right on the mark on a set of important topics: coverage of labor (and the anti-intellectualism in much economics/business reporting), hypocrisy in scandal mongering and human rights and a host of other arenas, racism in reporting, and the right-wing-funded punditocracy. I'm using the book to help my students learn about critical thinking ... and to show them that cultural analysis can be sharp and smart and funny without being obscure!

Norman Solomon's compilation of media essays analyzing and skewering the corporate media is not just an excellent historical journey, it make us look at ourselves and remember how the corporate media spin stories and successfully deceive a majority of the American people who are seduced by the slickness and gloss of the air brushed barie doll couple inhabiting the surreal world of the media and those behind the scenes, like the Wizard of Oz, who control what Americans see and read.

One of the best essays was one titled "Orwellian Logic 101" in
which Solomon defines terms currently adrift in the media universe and what they really mean. Terms such as terrorist, propaganda effort and responsible journalism.

Solomon's compilation is an excellent opportunity to awaken oneself from the media induced sleep which is too easily entered and from which it is difficult to awaken.

Solomon practices the important notion of viewing the world not as one thinks it ought to be but how it really is--full of lying politicians, seducers, PR men, and media sycophants who willingly and cheerfully participate as U.S. government spokesman and flag waving supporters for global hegemony supporting without question or critique American foreign policy.

Norm's highly accessible and often humorous writing style provides an excellent characterization of the increasingly skewed views being promulgated by the "popular" mainstream media in the United States. I highly recommend this compilation of short articles and political cartoons to those whose reading interests might include realpolitik, media spin or double-speak analysis. This book provides an excellent deconstruction of some of the more insidious distortions that are becoming increasingly evident in the corporate owned and influenced mainstream news.

I have had my own personal experience with the mainstream media and how they severely limit the reporting of serious corporate abuses and crimes. The general public is kept much in the dark about vital issues that affect their lives. It does not bode well for our democracy.

I think people who dismiss Solomon's serious concerns about how our news is disseminated, don't want to acknowledge the truth, because (it maybe too frightening) they then might have to take some responsibility for it.

A rich democracy embraces divergence. When books such as Solomon's are a standard part of America's public educational system, then democracy will truly be live and well in America.

As depicted on the cover illustration, Norman Solomon brilliantly shows us how the mass media behaves like submissive monkeys, well-trained by corporate power. The book effectively urges us to be concerned with the consequences of this behavior, particularly with the human rights abuses it fosters.

Honestly--I almost (almost) feel embarrassed for people like that. I'm very bad at math; therefore, I would never attempt to dazzle people with my mad calculus skillz. It just stands to reason. So why to people feel that, despite not being very bright, they're qualified to wield sarcasm? It's utterly beyond me.

Um...anyway. It's good to see books like this. A refreshing breath of fresh air in the morass of conservatism we are currently slogging through. I recommend it highly.

This is a tired book.... Reading it you get the idea that the author never quite got over the 60s as he rales against all the things any self-respecting liberal would have then. If it's something that business or government or the rich do, it's automatically suspect if not out-and-out evil. Eugene Debs would be proud of it, but Solomon's rants suggest he's run his course and can only hope of punditry to pay his future way. He screeches about workplace safety, just to take one example, but doesn't take into fact enormous improvements over the years. (Workplace accidents now stand at something under 7% of what they were in 1913, according to the latest research from the CDE... but then, they're a governmental agency, so must by lying, right Professor Solomon?) This is a Lone Ranger book... tedium, tedium, tedium-um-um. At least the cartoon are moderately amusing.

Why read The New York Review of Books when Norman Solomon can tell you why the local news weaterhman knows less than he does about the world. Yessiree, Norm's smart guy, smarter than you anyway, and he lets you now in this book. He doesn't pull his punches, he tells it like it is, blah,blah,blah,blah,blah. If you're a typical communty college would-be radical, this is your man. Otherwise, thre are about a million more illuminating authors in the world.

This book is comparable to the Pope calling Mother Teresa an atheist. Solomon's views are so far left that he actually believes moderate liberals are part of the vast right wing conspiracy. Don't waste your time.