Deborah Solomon
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 | This article may lend undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, or controversies. (November 2010) |
Deborah Solomon (born August 9, 1957, New York City) is a journalist, author, and cultural critic with a weekly question and answer 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 studied 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.
Professional work
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, and is the author of several biographies of American artists, including Jackson Pollock and Joseph Cornell. Solomon was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 for her unfinished biography of Norman Rockwell.[1]
Personal life
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.
Solomon is of Romanian descent on her father's side.[2]
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.[3][4][5]
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.[3][5]
In his exposé, "Questioning the Questioner," Elzweig reveals that both Glass's and Dickinson's interviews were taped.[5]
New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt criticized Solomon for the practice, calling for the publication to either comply with its own standards or to provide a disclaimer with each column.[6]
In 2010, she was criticized when, during an interview of former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livini published in the New York Times, she responded to remembrance of acts terrorism by Livini's parents by saying "it was a more romantic era."[7]
On November 29, 2010, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, she received criticism for her interview of actor/comedian/author Steve Martin. The interview centered around the comedian's recently released novel, Objects of Beauty. In response to emails being recieved in real-time by the Y staff from viewers of the interview, a note was dispatched to Solomon on-stage, telling her to shift the focus of the interview to Steve Martin's film career.[8]
The very poorly-received event resulted in the Y’s sending out a next-day apology, along with a promise of a refund.
Bibliography
- Jackson Pollock: A Biography, Simon & Schuster, 1987, ISBN 978-0815411826
- Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997, ISBN 0-374-18012-1
References
- ^ [1]
- ^ Deborah Solomon (December 16, 2007). "Independent Streak". The New York Times. Retrieved July 26, 2008.
- ^ 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 (October 14, 2007). "Questions and Answers, in No Particular Order". The New York Times.
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|citedate=ignored (help); Unknown parameter|pubdate=ignored (help) - ^ NYT describes Jewish terrorism as ‘romantic’
- ^ Steve Martin's Boring Appearance Prompts Audience Refunds