Amy Goodman on Patriotism | Amy Goodman | Big Think

Amy Goodman on Patriotism

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

America is limited by the way information is presented, Amy Goodman says.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amy Goodman:

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 700 TV and radio stations in North America. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its "Pick of the Podcasts," along with NBC's Meet the Press. With her brother, journalist David Goodman, she is the author of Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008), Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (2006) and The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (2004). She also writes a weekly column (also produced as an audio podcast) syndicated by King Features, for which she was recognized in 2007 with the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Reporting. Goodman is the winner of the 2007 Gracie Award for Individual Achievement for a Public Broadcasting Host, from American Women in Radio and Television, and is a 2007 honoree with the Paley Center/Museum of Television and Radio's She Made It Collection, which "Ccelebrates the achievements and preserves the legacy of great women writers, directors, producers, journalists, sportscasters, and executives." She was the 2006 recipient of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Daily reporting from Nigeria and East Timor has earned her the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Are everyday citizens responsible for what media they consume?

Amy Goodman: Well, you can’t know what you don’t know. But I do think that President [George W.] Bush getting it so wrong on weapons of mass destruction exposed more than him. It exposed the entire press corps, and that has opened up, I think, a huge media landscape to people. People across the political spectrum: Conservative Republicans, progressives, independents, Democrats; people care about war, about corporate control, about privacy, and I think the media getting so wrong, getting it all so wrong in this lead up to the invasion has made people look other places, and that’s why independent media is so important right now. I think it’s why Democracy Now! has grown so much, from a few dozen community radio stations in 1996, the first daily election show in public broadcasting, to over 700 stations now. Community Stations, yes.

Low Power College and Community Radio Stations, [Pacifica] Stations, now in PR Stations, PBS Stations, at two independent TV channels and the satellites, on DISH Network, Free Speech TV and Linked TV, both on Direct TV and DISH Network. And the reason I say all these, it’s not so easy to, you know, say “Oh, we broadcast on NBC or ABC”. That’s what a big network, that’s all you have to say.

But we are building an independent media network in this country, linking up with independent stations all over the world, and they are coming from every different sector. And so, we have to include them all when we talk about what is independent media, but people are looking other places, of course, to the web as well, and for us it’s democracynow.org. But, I think, independent media’s time has come, because people see, young and old, what it means when the media has a corporate agenda, how dangerous it is when our image is projected to the rest of the world through a corporate lens. I mean, if you look at the way the rest of the world sees us and the way we see ourselves, I think, that is very telling. If you ask someone what they think is the most famous image of the invasion, I dare say that someone in this country would probably say the image of Saddam Hussein, the statue going down, because we saw it thousands of times. Remember, April 9th, 2003, Firdos Square in Baghdad.

Read the full transcript at