I was recently assigned to interview Amy Goodman, award-winning journalist and host of Democracy Now! While I asked her about the presidential election and voter suppression and the woes of the world, Goodman was also willing to talk a little bit about journalism.
We spoke as she rode the train heading south out of New York City toward her destination in Washington DC, part of an 100-city tour for her new book, “The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance and Hope,” which she says shows how the work of ordinary people is pulling back the veil of corporate media and changing the world.
Goodman and co-author Dan Moynihan will visit Taos, Los Alamos, Santa Fe and Silver city next week. (Tour info at www.democracynow.org), and although her talk at The Lensic in Santa Fe is sold out, tickets are still available for a fundraiser on Oct. 10 to benefit KSFR-FM, a public radio station from which she will also do her show while she’s in town.
Yes, even on the book tour, the show must go own. It’s daily news, she explained.
“Every day is an adventure and a journey. We do very little planning ahead because we have every day to deal with and events are changing so quickly,” she said.
At that moment, Goodman was particularly excited about a face-to-face interview with Alice Walker, who is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the publication of her landmark novel The Color Purple. (That show aired on Sept. 29). I love that even a big shot like her still seems jazzed about a good story.
Goodman said she loves visiting “real people.”
“I see the media as a huge kitchen table that stretches across the globe that we all sit around and debate and discuss the most important issues of the day, like war and — peace, life and death — anything less than that is a disservice to the servicemen and women of this country who can’t have these debates on military bases. They rely on us in civilian society to have this discussion that leads to decisions about whether they lived or died or whether they are sent to kill or be killed. And anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.”
Goodman knows that even as she advocates against corporate-owned communication that some of the remaining family-owned newspapers in the nation are in what might be their death throes. She has a solution:
“I think that newspapers that are facing dire times right now and they think that it is only the Internet, they’ve got to open up. They’ve got to have diverse op-ed pages and even more than that, the front pages. Bring in more different voices. It is the voices of every one’s community. Open up, and then those people are interested in reading, whether we are talking about online or the paper newspapers or the networks,” she said.
Democracy Now! is aired on more than 1,100 radio and television stations and goes out daily on the Internet. Her syndicated column is also printed across the nation. So, which medium is best?
“Every one of them reaches different people,” she said. “I mean, of course, that at Democracy Now! we are reaching the world, but there still is a big digital divide. People have access to the Internet and some people don’t. So it is important to be broadcasting and be on satellite TV as well. I think each is extremely important to be multimedia, to be multiplatform, to reach out to as many people as possible. And the more that we reach out the more fascinating stories come in because people are tuning in all over the world.”
Goodman tips her proverbial hat to journalists on the ground everywhere. Her advice is “to keep at it, to be persistent, not to give up.”
“We need more journalists, not less. Because journalists are the watchdogs of a democratic society, and as we see increasingly concentrated wealth and concentrated media, we need independent journalists out there who are really digging and seeking out the truth. People are really expanding what they listen to and are looking for authentic real voices instead of the know-nothing pundits. …
There is a real crackdown on dissent, and the media has to stand up to that and I also think that that will help save the media. We are not supposed to be a party to the party. We are supposed to be apart from them. There is a reason why our profession, journalists, is the only one that is specifically protected by the U.S. Constitution. We are supposed to be the check and balance on power. We have to be able to do our job. The media must be a sanctuary of dissent because dissent is what is going to save this country.”