Deborah Solomon
 |
Deborah Solomon (born August 9, 1957) is a journalist and cultural critic with a weekly Questions and Answers column in The New York Times Magazine titled "Questions For". Her column has appeared in the newspaper's weekend magazine since 2003.
Early life and education
Solomon was born in New York City and was educated at Cornell University, where she majored in art history and served as the associate editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. She received a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Solomon began her career writing about art for various publications. For most of the 1990s, she served as the chief art critic of The Wall Street Journal. She has written extensively about American painting in particular, and is the author of several biographies of American artists, including Jackson Pollock: A Biography and Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell. In 2001, she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in the field of biography.
She is married to Kent Sepkowitz, a physician and infectious-disease specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and they have two sons, Eli Sepkowitz and Leo Sepkowitz, the founder of the sports blog, Leobeingleo.com.
Criticism
In 2006, NBC television host Tim Russert, who was interviewed by Solomon for her "Questions For" column, publicly accused her of distorting his comments. The interview was scheduled for Mother's Day, and, in the published version, Solomon repeatedly asks Russert to describe memories of his mother, only to have Russert evade her and talk about other topics. Russert charged, among other things, that Solomon combined two questions, skipping his answer to the first entirely and jumping straight into the second, in order to fit her intended characterization of him as evasive to certain queries. Russert made his allegations in a letter to the magazine, but the editors chose not to print it until over a month after the interview was published and after the magazine had printed a number of negative-toned letters from readers angered over his apparent evasion regarding questions about his mother.[1][2][3]
Dickinson and Glass disclosed to Matt Elzweig of the New York Press certain exchanges from each of their printed interviews with Solomon that actually never took place. Shedding light on the process, Dickinson explained that Solomon created the false exchanges by combining and editing selections from the interviews and coupling those selections with questions that either hadn't preceded them or, in some cases, that she had made up after the interviews were over.[1][3]
In his exposé, "Questioning the Questioner," Elzweig reveals that both Glass's and Dickinson's interviews were taped.[3]
New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt criticized Solomon for the practice, calling for the publication to either comply with their own standards or to provide a disclaimer with each column.[4]
Books
- Jackson Pollock: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1987, ISBN 978-0815411826)
- Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, ISBN 978-0878466849)
- Forthcoming biography of Norman Rockwell, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in 2010.
References
- ^ a b New York Press: "Questions for the Questioner"
- ^ The Miami Herald on Deborah Solomon
- ^ a b c The Huffington Post: "New York Press Raps Deborah Solomon Over Creatively-Edited Q&As"
- ^ Hoyt, Clark. "Questions and Answers, in No Particular Order".
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|citedate=ignored (help); Unknown parameter|pubdate=ignored (help)