By Morgan Currie

On Saturday afternoon, May 8, Amy Goodman appeared before an overflowing, adoring crowd at the Bagdad Theatre. She was in Portland as part of a book tour for her first book, The Exception to the Rulers, co-authored with her brother, David Goodman. Amy is an award-winning journalist and host of Democracy Now!, a national daily independent news program airing on over 225 stations in North America. She has won numerous awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting as well as awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Following the presentation of a 30-minute documentary created by New York indymedia, Goodman took the mic. She gave an hour-long speech on thoughts ranging from the failure of the press to adequately cover the Iraq war to her own experiences with near-death and violence in East Timor. Her words were eloquent and moving, almost in the spirit of a preacher as her voice rose and whipped up emotion in the theater. Her speech sounded meticulously memorized — not surprising, considering she has traveled to over 80 cities this year, bringing a message all over the United States about the responsibility that journalists, citizens and the government have to uphold the trough.

Aided by Flying Focus Video Collective producer PC Perry, I was able to grab a second of Amy’s time before she headed south to Eugene that same day for another stop on the tour.

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MC: How did you enter a career in journalism?

AG: I always wanted to be a journalist. In high school I was editor of my school newspaper. Then when I moved to New York, I came across Pacifica radio station, wbai. By listening, I was shocked by how fascinating it was and hearing all the grittiness of New York City. No one was trying to sell anything, just the variety of voices talking about the issues of our day. And I found it in 1985 and never left.

MC: What would you like to see the mainstream press covering that they’re not?

AG: The reality of war. Show us pictures on the ground, show us people in hospitals, show us the suffering, the people who have died, name their names. The media can save lives; when people see a media spotlight shed on something important, they care and they do something about it. But as long as they don’t see it, they can’t care, and that’s what the media has served to do: keep our attention diverted away from the most important issues of our day. Show us what’s happening in the hospitals of Baghdad, of Hilla, where cluster bombs have been used, do specials on depleted uranium. Basically, go to our Web site, Democracynow.org, do all those stories. Our motto is “Steal the Story, Please.”

MC: Can you describe how radio broadcast is being used now in communities to spread information, especially in developing countries?

AG: Radio is closest to my heart, it’s how I began. We started doing tv several years ago. It opens and it brings us new communities of viewers because a lot of people like to get their information from TV, but radio is closest to my heart. And when I was covering the Zapatista uprising — when Commandante Marcos and the Zapatistas rose up against NAFTA — the first news conference he held was for radio reporters because he said it’s the most important media. It is the most important mass media that reaches the greatest number of people, because it’s the least expensive, you can have a radio for a whole village. And I love it because you can take a microphone and a small tape recorder somewhere and you don’t need a whole film crew. It’s the most intimate, the most accessible, on both ends, the listener and then producing it. And then I think people use it all over the world in that way. In Haiti, during the coup of 1991-1994, radio stations were ransacked, people were arrested who played musique engagée — engaged music. It really matters, it mobilizes people. It’s the medium of the greatest imagination. You’re not tied to the images, you can let your imagination soar, you can do other things while you listen. Radio is so important.

MC: How do you see NPR? It’s not quite corporate, but it’s not in league with totally independent media.

AG: I think NPR needs to get back to its roots. We’re increasingly on NPR stations because of community call for it, requests for it, and putting the public back in public radio. NPR began by broadcasting an anti-war protest in Washington. And I think it’s very important to get back to its roots of really emphasizing non-officialdom. Sure, have voices of those in power, but also bring in that full diversity of voices that represents not just a fringe majority or a silent majority, but a silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media.

MC: I know you’re sometimes in hot zones and you have to quickly get the information out. How does this work technically?

AG: We’ve done broadcasts from Timor, which the whole country only had less than one T1 line and we were sending full TV broadcast. My colleagues have reported from iraq and they had to report through a firewall that Saddam Hussein had set up blocking anything from going out, and we were sending out over the internet broadcast- quality video in a program called Split, and it’s like going through a mesh screen, and it went right through to 500 emails and then you put it back together on the other end. There’s all sorts of ways to do it technically. The indymedia folks are great at that, and it’s enabled us to do TV broadcast programs over the world.

MC: How are your reporters doing in Iraq and how is their safety ensured?

AG: We find the most effective way to cover Iraq is to pull on a diversity of sources. People like Robert Fisk, international reporters who are not just giving us the U.S. line, working with the U.S. press. There are some very brave U.S. reporters as well. So we find people who are in the places we feel people need to hear from and call those people.

Morgan Currie is a writer and filmmaker living in Portland. She currently works as an associate producer at Oregon Public Broadcasting.

 

For more information check out www.democracynow.org