Amy Goodman Takes on the MediaPhotos By Margaret Michniewicz
The truth according to the Goodmans, both participants and champions of independent media, is that the “role of reporters is to go where the silence is, to bring us the voices of the people who are at ground zero.” “The media should not be acting as a conveyor belt for the lies of the administration,” Amy Goodman said in Burlington. “The lies take lives. They matter. We need a media that challenges the assumptions.” Every day, on over 200 radio and TV stations, Goodman’s show Democracy Now! challenges those in power positions and provides a place for the powerless to share their experiences. Two to three stations pick it up each week; they can hardly keep up with demand, Goodman said. Democracy Now! began broadcasting with Pacifica Radio in 1996. Goodman has covered significant domestic and international events throughout her 20-year career. In those years, she says she has learned “that when a politician says ‘That’s ridiculous,’ you’re usually on the right track.” That was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s response when reporters asked him about U.S. involvement in the coup d’état and kidnapping of Haitian President Aristide in February this year. Those reporters were getting their information from the AP, who was picking up DN’s direct reports from Goodman who was with Aristide. Goodman calls this “trickle-up” journalism. That is the exception in the media today, a media which she says is “extreme,” not mainstream, compliant, not challenging. The Bush Administration took that for granted when they first saw photos from Abu Ghraib months ago; they just didn’t believe the media would put them out. “They didn’t have to send out an edict or call up the papers,” Goodman contends. “It’s actually more frightening than that — it’s about self-censorship. Trading truth for access.” About the prison pictures, the media says, “The Arab world is incensed.” Goodman retorts, “It’s not just the Arab world. It’s the human world. It’s the whole world, repulsed by what they are seeing.” “The context [for the acts in the photos] is set back home,” she says, “when we don’t hear other voices, understand where other people are coming from.” “There is so much to be accomplished” in America today, Goodman says. “We need to shore up all the public spaces, sanctuaries of dissent” like independent bookstores and libraries. “Get involved in your community. Become the leaders that you are looking for.” “Challenge [censorship] anywhere [you] hear it, or see it, or sniff it because it’s a threat to democracy.” Vermont tour sponsors and donation beneficiaries included: Everyone’s Books and radio free brattleboro, Bear Pond Books and WGDR 91.1 (Plainfield), the Peace & Justice Center and Free Radio Burlington, and Vermont Friends of Democracy Now!. PJC Executive Director Chris Meehan introduced the Burlington event by saying, “It’s important to tie together what’s happening globally, what’s happening nationally, with what we can do about it. Democracy Now! www.democracynow.org |
Amy
Goodman received standing ovations at all three of her Vermont speaking
engagements May 22-23 — before she spoke. This is just another example
of what she and brother David, co-authors of The Exception to the Rulers:
Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them
(Hyperion, 2004), have seen all across the country on their 70-city book
tour. There is a “tremendous hunger for independent voices, voices
of dissent that are missing from corporate media,” said David Goodman,
who lives in Waterbury Center, “People are clamoring for the truth.”