Eric Alterman – författare

Why does Bruce Springsteen mean so much to so many people? Apart from Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, no contemporary popular musician has had the cultural impact that Bruce Springsteen has on America. Since he was appointed in the late 1970s as "the future of rock and roll" and appeared on the covers of both "Time" and "Newsweek", he has redefined the image of the rock star. Political journalist Eric Alterman examines the unique phenomenon that is The Boss and how he has come to reflect and interpret a turbulent quarter-century of American history.

Widely acclaimed and hotly contested, veteran journalist Eric Alterman's ambitious investigation into the true nature of the U.S. news media touched a nerve and sparked debate across the country. As the question of whose interests the media protects-and how-continues to raise hackles, Alterman's sharp, utterly convincing assessment cuts through the cloud of inflammatory rhetoric, settling the question of liberal bias in the news once and for all. Eye-opening, witty, and thoroughly and solidly researched, What Liberal Media? is required reading for media watchers, and anyone concerned about the potentially dangerous consequences for the future of democracy in America.

Fights about the fate of the state of Israel, and the Zionist movement that gave birth to it, have long been a staple of both Jewish and American political culture. But despite these arguments' significance to American politics, American Jewish life, and to Israel itself, no one has ever systematically examined their history and explained why they matter. In We Are Not One, historian Eric Alterman traces this debate from its nineteenth-century origins. Following Israel's 1948-1949 War of Independence (called the "nakba" or "catastrophe" by Palestinians), few Americans, including few Jews, paid much attention to Israel or the challenges it faced. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, however, almost overnight support for Israel became the primary component of American Jews' collective identity. Over time, Jewish organizations joined forces with conservative Christians and neoconservative pundits and politicos to wage a tenacious fight to define Israel's image in the US media, popular culture, Congress, and college campuses. Deeply researched, We Are Not One reveals how our consensus on Israel and Palestine emerged and why, today, it is fracturing.

If there's one thing we know about our current president, it's that he lies. Donald Trump's lies are so ubiquitous, so incessant, and so habitual that they have become inescapable -- from his false claims about the size of his inauguration crowd to his whole cloth invention of a terrorist attack in Sweden to his assertion that Democrats are planning to give free cars to undocumented immigrants. But while he may lie more frequently and brazenly than any other American president, he is certainly not the first to mislead the public.With Lying in State, bestselling historian and commentator Eric Alterman asks how we ended up with such a pathologically dishonest commander in chief -- and what consequences his serial mendacity might have for the future. To answer these questions, Alterman explores the long history of presidential lying, showing that from early on, the United States has persistently expanded its power and hegemony on the basis of presidential lies. Over time, these deceptions have had a cumulative and pernicious effect: each lie a president tells makes it easier and more acceptable for subsequent presidents to lie. Worse still, the media have largely abandoned their responsibility as referees of news and information, uncritically repeating presidential lies and failing to issue corrections even after lies are revealed. Donald Trump, then, represents not an aberration but the culmination of an age-old trend.Full of vivid historical examples and trenchant analysis, Lying in State is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we arrived in this age of alternative facts.