from The Progressive:
Amy Goodman Interview
By Elizabeth DiNovella, February 2008 Issue
Amy Goodman is one of the leading journalists of our time. -She is executive producer and host of Democracy Now, a daily, independent radio and television news program broadcast on 650 stations around the world.
“I’ve always been surprised that people say it’s a hopeful program because we deal with such difficult subjects,” she says. “But I think it’s hopeful because of the people we interview. They are both the analysts and those that are doing something about it, wherever they might be.”
Many people, including myself, have relied upon Amy Goodman’s reporting on the Bush Administration. She’s the left hook to the rightwing Administration’s assault on our civil liberties. She doesn’t flinch from tough topics like torture, and she interviews people other media neglect, such as Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni national who was a victim of the CIA rendition program. She scrums with the likes of Lou Dobbs. And her coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq goes beyond retired generals and Beltway pundits. Unlike other news programs, anti-war voices get their say on Democracy Now.
She has a missionary zeal and calls journalism “a sacred responsibility.” Goodman started out as a volunteer at WBAI, the Pacifica radio station in New York City. She went on to become WBAI’s news director. She launched Democracy Now as a radio show on the Pacifica network in 1996 and eventually it evolved into a television program.
She’s done her share of international reporting, too. In 1991, Indonesian soldiers beat her bloody and fractured the skull of Allan Nairn in East Timor as they followed a memorial procession. She and Nairn survived the Santa Cruz massacre, though 270 Timorese were killed. Goodman and Nairn were thrown out of the country and produced Massacre: The Story of East Timor, a documentary about the Indonesian and American involvement in the Southeast Asian nation. They won numerous awards for their reporting, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award, the Armstrong Award, the Radio/Television News Directors Award, as well as awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She returned to East Timor for live coverage in 2002 when the nation gained its independence.
...(snip)...
Q: The FCC just relaxed media ownership limits. What’s your response to that?
Goodman: We’ve got hundreds of channels with fewer and fewer owners and it’s a very big problem. There’s the illusion of diversity but what matters is who owns these channels. That’s why regulations are so important.
The media is the place where we have a discussion with each other. We can’t know everyone individually. We do it through the media. When the kitchen table that we all sit around is controlled by a very few, they are deciding who comes to the table, and that can determine the decisions that are made, when we go to war and when we don’t.
Q: What do you think was the mainstream media’s biggest failing regarding the Iraq War?
Goodman: Simply that it beat the drums for war. As Noam Chomsky says, the media manufactures consent, and they did it for war. There were so many people all over the globe who were protesting the war. In February 2003, millions of people marched, yet the Bush Administration went forward, enabled by the Democrats.
The media act as a megaphone for those in power, the Democrats and the Republicans. When the spectrum of debate between them is very small, that’s as far as the media will go. In the lead up to the invasion, the Democrats joined with Republicans in authorizing war. The media overwhelmingly presented that point of view, that pro-war position, even though most people in this country were opposed to the war.
And now the latest news we find is that the Democratic leaders like House Speaker Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, and former Senator Bob Graham were briefed for years on waterboarding, on torture. Where was the protest?
On Democracy Now, we’ve just spoken to Henri Alleg, the French journalist who was in Algeria, now in his eighties, who describes waterboarding as if it were yesterday. Because when you yourself are tortured, you never forget. He described what it meant to feel like he was suffocating, not “simulated drowning” but actually drowning. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.progressive.org/mag_intv0208
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