Ode To Amy Goodman

[donheld]

by Joyce Marcel

O Amy Goodman, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

First, you are the anti-Judith Miller, the discredited New York Times reporter who beat the drums for Bush and Cheney's illegal war, who embedded her journalistic integrity for a chance to play with the big boys. Were they really that big, Judy? Really?

You, Amy Goodman, sneer at the very word "embedded." You treasure journalistic independence. For twenty years, first as news director of WBAI in New York, one of Pacifica Radio's flagship stations, and since 1994 the lovely and formidable one-non-blonde eye at the center of the growing whirlwind of horrible truths that is "Democracy Now!," you have reported news free of corporate underwriting.

"The media should be like a huge kitchen table that stretches across this country, where we discuss life and death, war and peace - and anything less is a disservice to this country," you said at Keene (N.H.) State College this past weekend, to an enthusiastic crowd of over 600 people. "My mission is to make dissent commonplace in this country."

Day after day, "Democracy Now!" reports the news to a growing audience on some 400 non-commercial radio stations, public access stations, on the Dish satellite network and DirecTV (on Link). The show also podcasts on the Web (democracynow.org) so "people around the world can have access to the news from the grassroots level."

You are often branded as "far left," but it's hard to know exactly what that means. You are for freedom and democracy, and isn't that exactly what our adrift president, George W. Bush, is trying to spread across the world?


http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1109-32.htm

[femrap]

1. She's better than Walter Cronkite! nt

[NMDemDist2]

2. huzzah! for Amy-- one of my three broadcast news sources

along with Jon Stewart and KO

[Douglas Carpenter]

3. here is a link to stream her show

http://www.democracynow.org/streampage.pl