Amy Goodman doesn”t often praise corporate news media for “doing the right thing,” but those were the words of the prominent progressive during a Saturday night visit to Cotton Auditorium while describing coverage of the Katrina disaster.
Goodman, host of the syndicated radio and television news program “Democracy Now!,” first told how President Bush and Vice President Cheney continued with vacations and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued shoe shopping to explain how the media got to New Orleans before government handlers arrived in the Big Easy.
“Here you have the Bush administration not responding. But the corporate media did, and they did the right thing,” Goodman said. “They went to New Orleans to report, where we saw something very unusual unfold. There were no troops to imbed with, they weren”t spun, they weren”t imbedded. So we saw something perhaps for the first time, the corporate media reporting from the victims” perspective. It shocked this nation.”
The harshest of media critics, Goodman still clearly also loves quality journalism and believes the media can help revive democracy if it can learn to resist inappropriate government and corporate guidance and spin.
“If you were Republican, Democrat or Independent, it didn”t matter [when watching the reporting on New Orleans]. This was humanity responding to humanity. Can you imagine if we saw those same images from Iraq for one week? The soldiers dying, the woman with her legs blown off by a cluster bomb. Americans are a compassionate people. They would see that war is not the answer to conflict in the 21st century.”
That brought thunderous applause from the audience of 750 to 800 people who paid $20 each, with the money going to support independent local radio and public access television. The number of tickets sold means between $15,000 and $16,000 was raised for KZYX&Z and Mendocino Coast Television (formerly MCCET, now MCTV). Cotton Auditorium holds a maximum of 842 people. Radio station KOZT, owned by Tom Yates, gave up a scheduled Local Licks concert at Cotton to help support the fund-raiser for community radio and television.
Linda Rosengarten, board member of MCTV, Fort Bragg school trustee and owner of Cheshire Books, started the meeting by asking all the veterans to stand up to be recognized. About 50 veterans stood and were applauded. Most seemed to be Vietnam-era-aged.
“Amy Goodman is a person of immense courage,” Rosengarten said. “She is a dissenter, a voice of dissent that is not just brave but a risky thing to do with your life.
“Many of us in this room, I would venture most of us in this room, find our own courage in her and through her. She has given up an incredible part of her private life for what she believes in, and what we believe in, which is truth and justice … the independent media and what it means to a democracy.”
Goodman has become a cult-like figure for progressives in America during a now-suddenly-bygone time of total Republican dominance. Her leftist news and criticism show, “Democracy Now!,” founded in 1996, also blossomed during a time when most other news radio and TV shows came from the right wing. Locally, her show plays each morning on KZYX at 8 a.m. As her popularity increased, the program was moved to the prime spot recently, replacing BBC News, which now airs earlier in the morning. She also is shown daily on MCTV.
Goodman”s show may be the primary national radio platform for publication of reports by and about the independent media, the survival of which she equates with the survival of democracy itself. She also provides some of the harshest and most insightful media criticism, focusing on the errors, omissions and especially the shameless official lines of the mainstream media.
“Democracy Now!” also provides its own news coverage of daily events, from a critical, progressive perspective, but done within the confines of journalism ethics, including giving the criticized the chance to respond. She may be most famous for an aggressive interview that irked then-President Bill Clinton. She boils what she does down to one word: “dissent.”
Goodman”s most ardent fans often fail to appreciate her adherence to the classical standards and ethics of broadcast journalism. Goodman speaks in a low alto bordering on baritone. Her vowel stretching, slow but clear commentary harkens to old school radio techniques used to overcome static and to reach listeners prior to the era of TV hosts who talk at a machine gun pace.
Her second book is “Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight,” and she was promoting it in Fort Bragg.
She said sound may be clearer than in the classic days of radio but the message that people get from the corporate media is more garbled than ever.
“We called our book Static” because all we get in this high tech digital age with high resolution television and digital radio is static, that veil of distortion, lies and half truths that obscure reality.
“We need a media that covers power, not covers for power,” she added.
Goodman”s brand of sensationalism is to stir surprise and emotion with obscure facts produced by investigative reporting. She got a big cheer when she said Donald Rumsfeld now owns “Mount Misery,” the slave estate once owned by the master of Frederick Douglass. Another crowd favorite was when she told of a proposal to imbed a piece of Saddam Hussein”s statue in the foundation of a new building at the World Trade Center. “If he does that, we will have the first proven link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11,” she said.
Goodman brings history and long-term memory to issues that the mainstream media generally lacks. “Democracy Now!” took an in-depth look at Robert Gates, who was controversial 20 years ago when he was a righthand man to CIA Director Bill Casey during the Iran-Contra scandal. That was reported by the mainstream media at the time, but is not often brought up on broadcasts since his nomination by the president for Secretary of Defense.
Goodman”s criticism of the Iraq war began at its outset, when most newspapers, liberal and conservative, were supporting it. She said the mainstream media has lagged behind even the president himself in challenging the war.
“Now that it is acceptable to talk about what should happen in Iraq, now that the president says there has to be a discussion about Iraq … if we are going to talk about what is going to happen in Iraq, we should talk to Iraqis,” Goodman said.
She said that is highly unlikely to happen with a media stuck on narrow perspectives and recycled “experts.”
She added that the networks, with their narrow reporting, were stealing airwaves that belong to the American people.
“ABC, CBS, and NBC — they are using a national treasure, and they have a responsibility to bring us the full diversity of opinion, not just that small circle of pundits we see every day, pundits who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong,” she said.
Goodman also talked about the dearth of photos coming from Iraq and the president”s order that no photos of flag-draped coffins be taken. She remembered how photos like the killing of a prisoner by a South Vietnamese police chief and a naked girl running from napalm helped to end the Vietnam war.
“Show the pictures. That”s what most effects people. What they can”t see, they can”t know,” she said.
The U.S. military has had a strategy of keeping the media away from carnage. Old timers in journalism were amazed at the lack of vivid photos of combatants coming over the AP photo wire during the first days of the current war, replaced by impressive graphics of weapons and strategy plans, often released by the military.
With marketing experts now helping plan news, many media outlets have learned that the public does not want to see photos of bodies or carnage, with the media now saying they are in bad taste.
“I say it is war that is in bad taste,” Goodman said, drawing applause.
“The Pentagon has deployed the media, and we have to take it back,” she added.
Goodman is on a 100-city speaking tour that started on Labor Day weekend in Cape Cod. She was scheduled to speak at 9:30 a.m. in San Luis Obispo the day after leaving Fort Bragg well past 9 p.m.
A Harvard graduate and native New Yorker, Goodman delivered humor about how Fort Bragg was just a little farther down those windy roads than she expected.
“[Being in San Luis Obispo the next morning] made so much sense when we were sitting in New York,” she said.
She described one of the protester mothers of soldiers who arrived in Dallas planning to drive to President Bush”s home in Crawford, thinking, “It”s in Texas, how far can it be?”
“Right about now I sympathize,” she said. Goodman”s driver, Chuck Scurich, said Highway 20 between Fort Bragg and Willits, with its 100-plus curves, was the worst road he had ever driven.
Peace activist Phil Ebert, who stands with a peace flag alongside Highway 1 in Caspar each Sunday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., is also a Vietnam veteran. He liked the applause for veterans and was impressed by Goodman”s intellect.
“We need to see what”s going on,” Ebert said. “Right now people want to turn a deaf ear to what our government is doing. She makes it hard to do that.”
Thais Mazur sees the journalistic excellence in Goodman. “She asks really hard questions and looks behind the scenes. She talks to real people and tells their stories. Personal stories are really, really powerful.”
Patricia Lawrence interviewed Goodman backstage after the show for a program to be broadcast on American Forces Radio. Lawrence said if she misses Goodman”s show at 8 a.m. locally, she streams it from the democracynow.org Website. She enjoys learning history and hearing from truly independent experts and from soldiers who object to the war, perspectives not found elsewhere.
“On Friday, Daniel Ellsberg apologized on her show,” Lawrence observed. “He apologized for not blowing the whistle sooner.” Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, helping precipitate the end of the Vietnam War.
Most of the big crowd in Cotton was gray or graying. Two young women who had purchased a book and were waiting in line for Goodman to sign it were worried about that.
“The youth really need to get more involved. I look at the people around us, and they”re almost all older folks,” Katrina Aschenbrenner, 34, said. “It”s upsetting to me. I”m working to help with that. [Goodman] is powerful and she speaks from the heart. She speaks to me on the radio all the time, with her voice and her passion. I don”t know what it will take to wake young people up,” Aschenbrenner said.
Jen Lawhorne, 27, said, “It”s time to rise up. It is time to start to take responsibility for the way we live in the world.
“I”m here. I don”t know why more young people are not here. Maybe it is because my generation is infected with apathy. A lot of these people are from the generation that resisted the Vietnam War and remember how real change was made.”
While Goodman is among the harshest critics of United States foreign policy, she believes that the United States stands for and can regain its role as an agent for good in the world.
She told the local crowd how in 1991, covering the independence movement in East Timor, Goodman and fellow journalist Allan Nairn were badly beaten by Indonesian soldiers during a massacre of Timorese demonstrators. She said when the bloodied U.S. journalists arrived at the hospital, doctors and nurses cried. She added the U.S. represents both the sword of imperialism and the shield of democracy to the world.
“They cried because their shield was bloodied,” she said.
In 2004 Goodman published her first book, a New York Times bestseller, “The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them,” also co-written with her brother, Mother Jones magazine reporter David Goodman.
Amy Goodman also has a new weekly newspaper column, “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” released by King Features Syndicate, according to Wikipedia.com.
