Deconstructing Thomas Friedman
NEW YORK - A new book on the influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman sets out to debunk his hawkish, neo-liberal views, accusing him of overt racism, factual errors and skewed judgments on issues ranging from the United States invasion of Iraq to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Deconstructing one of the country's highest-paid journalists, Belen Fernandez's The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work presents a comprehensive overview of the man - and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner - she describes as "characterized by reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality".
Fernandez, 29, admits that prior to 2009 she wasn't too familiar with the work of the foreign affairs columnist. It wasn't until that summer she decided to analyze Friedman's work after reading "a sequence of ridiculous articles".
Finding it difficult to ''cram all of that incompetence into a concise book'', Fernandez divided the content into three issues that ''most enraged'' her, analyzing his work along with a brief examination of the shortcomings of the US media.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ML10Dj01.html