How To Democratize The Media

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Amy Goodman has faith in the power of authentic stories.

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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.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Amy Goodman: Oh, I don’t think it’s that hard. People are attracted to or interested in authentic stories and people’s life experiences. When you hear the name of a person and you hear them telling their story, you stop. You take a breath. You listen. As opposed to the, you know, the know nothing punditry that we get on all the networks. I mean, that is not interesting, and so when people say… People aren’t interested in politics. Look, are they tuning in to these political discussions? We have to bring them entertainment. No, and they’re smart not to, because that is chatter. That is not what is actually happening. That’s a certain class of a very select, small group of people. But when you have people telling their own stories… I’ll give an example. A few days ago, we did a story on recruiters, and we didn’t have the professors or the pundits talking about recruiting in America. We had 2 kids. We had Irving Gonzales and Eric Martinez. Eric, 17, and Irving is 18, and they’re friends, and they come from a poor section of Houston, Texas, and they were being heavily recruited. The recruiters are crawling through their high school. I mean, they’re in their classrooms and they will call them out.

They will say, “Hey. I wanna talk to you,” when they’re sitting in their classroom. And these kids agreed to be part of something called the delayed enlistment program. You know, they’d graduate from high school and then they go into the military, but it was nonbinding, what they signed. And when they decided not to do it, they wanted to go on to college directly, the recruiter said, well, they would be arrested, that they now had to go to war. And they resisted. One was taken to a hotel, on his way to basic training.

They were threatened. And we had the two other kids on, talking, and we had a Congressman on, Gene Green from Houston, hearing them tell their stories, how one was taken to a hotel. He was not able to go down from the second floor to the first floor. The elevator was disabled, so he couldn’t go down, and he was gonna end up who knows where, in Iraq or Afghanistan. And it was a remarkable story, how his friend called him up and said, “Where are you?” he said, “Well, I’m already in the hotel. This isn’t a game. We have to go or we’re gonna end up in jail.” And he said, “That’s not true. I’ve been talking to people. I found out this is untrue. They’re lying to us.” And of course they were. The recruiter was. But we also had on the head of the army recruiting command from Louisville, Kentucky, a man named Douglas Smith, and asked them about why they were being told they would be arrested if they didn’t go to war. The sergeant in charge of their… The sergean...

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