Pasadena Star-News, Whittier Daily News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune

Listening In
Pacifica Radios Amy Goodman slams compliant news media

By Sandy Wells
Times Staff Writer

May 7, 2004

Its hard to determine who Amy Goodman, award-winning Pacifica radio journalist and host of Democracy, Now! is more suspicious of; corrupt politicians, or the compliant, corporate media that is supposed to keep an eye on them.

Goodman is winding up a 70-city tour touting her new book (co-written with her brother David Goodman), The Exception to the Rulers and taking her 1960s-style message of questioning authority to the people. When I spoke with her before a lecture at USC a couple of weeks ago, her exhilaration with the positive response was only matched by her exhaustion.

Can you FedEx me some sleep? she said half jokingly. To produce her morning show while on the West Coast, Goodman had to go at 3 a.m. here in order to be heard at her normal time on the East Coast. And with many events going late into the night, she had been sustained by the slimmest allowance of sleep time.

Its amazing that there is such a hunger for information out there, Goodman said alluding to her stop in Fresno where the fire marshals had to shut out fans from the indoor event to prevent overcrowding. Its celebrating independent media in the country every step of the way. It gives an opportunity to focus on the whole media landscape from radio to television to Internet and independent bookstores thats all of the different ways that voices get out.

And unlike the take usually heard on politically oriented AM talk radio, its not about Republican versus Democrat. Goodman says she wont to enter the partisan fray on one side or another.

The political lines are breaking down. Conservatives just like Progressives are concerned about the amount of U.S. soldiers who are dying in Iraq, now over 700.

When you have a media that beats the drums for war, that didnt allow an open debate about whether the invasion should happen. I mean, F.A.I.R. (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) did a study in the week leading up to and after Colin Powell gave his address at the U.N. of the four major nightly news shows for two weeks around the time of 393 interviews around war, three were with anti-war representatives. That is not a media providing a forum for debate. Thats a media beating the drums for war. And that does a disservice to the service men and women of this country, because they cant have these debates on military bases. Its up to us in civilian society to do that.

With more than half the country against the idea of going to war in Iraq without giving the inspections more time, Goodman wonders why the big four free media news outlets provided only three anti war guests out of nearly 400 interviews.

That is [the media] serving just as simply the mouthpiece of the administration.

Besides her striving to be a voice for the Silenced Majority, Goodman appears at times like a tornado chaser, ever willing to risk her safety to get to the center of a story.

When I last interviewed this remarkable journalist back in 1999, she spoke to me by phone from Taiwan, where she had just been deported from East Timor, then in the throes of its struggle for independence. Fearless as ever, before the tour to promote the book, Goodman thrust herself into coverage of the recent overthrow of the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti.

Listeners heard her phone in reports from over the mid-Atlantic where she was part of a group flying a chartered plane to fetch the exiled Aristide and bring him back to the Caribbean. This was in defiance of the U.S. governments effort to keep the controversial political figure in Africa.

Goodmans program, Democracy, Now! airs on KPFK-FM 90.7 - weekdays, 6 a.m. 9 a.m. with a repeat from 9 a.m. 10 a.m. Her morning program is carried by 140 radio stations at last count. Goodman told me she was about to be picked up by her first PBS radio outlet in the Bay Area.