Voice of America

By Evan Derkacz, AlterNet. Posted February 14, 2005.

Amy Goodman grew up in Bayshore, Long Island, the daughter of progressive activists. After graduating from Harvard during the Reagan era, she returned to New York City, shortly thereafter finding a home at WBAI, New York's Pacifica Radio station. In 1991, she was severely beaten while on assignment in Indonesia, after which she made an award-winning documentary — an early version of her take-no-prisoners style of journalism in which the U.S. government's complicity in the killing of East Timorese was duly noted.

Then, Goodman began hosting Democracy Now! on Pacifica as a temporary series leading up to the Bill Clinton / Bob Dole presidential race of 1996. The rest, as they say, is public broadcasting history. The program has grown in popularity ever since and saw a huge spike since Bush took office.

Goodman’s program is broadcast every morning on over 300 stations in North America "from a firehouse in lower Manhattan." Democracy Now! is available via the radio, TV, or the web and is currently the largest public media collaboration in the U.S. Goodman, Democracy Now!'s first and only host, along with Juan Gonzalez, has seen her popularity rise even further on the strength of her best-selling book, co-written with her brother, David Goodman: The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them.

While Democracy Now! amplifies the voices of "ordinary people from around the world" and considers the opinions of grassroots activists to be every bit as legitimate as those of "officials," don't call it "progressive." Goodman insists that political labels are "breaking down ... we have to have a new way of looking at the way people look at the world."

Goodman recently spoke with AlterNet over the telephone.

AlterNet: Everyone has a pet theory on why Bush won. What's yours?

Amy Goodman: If he won.

If he won, right.

Well, we know he didn't win in 2000, and we don't know about now. Because we are increasingly going towards a system that can't be verified and since, in the U.S., elections are held up as the symbol of democracy, it's very important that we be able to verify these elections. The fact that people are suspicious is a very big problem. The fact that you can have places in Ohio where there are 360 voters and 4,200 votes for Bush — this is a big problem. And that's just the places we know. There's also the huge amount of voter suppression and intimidation that goes on for Election Day.

Whether or not he won, even by their count, he's got something like 30 percent of the vote — this isn't very impressive. It is hardly a mandate and I think that's what matters because I think we have a situation in this country where, for example, most people are opposed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and yet the person who is behind that invasion and occupation has won, so I don't think that this is a mandate, certainly [not] for Bush foreign policy.

Given the predisposition of the American people and the media, do you think it's worthwhile to try and track down exactly what happened and the possibility that Bush didn't win, or do you think the energy would be better spent working toward reform?

Well, I think this is also an indication of the way the press works in this country, because if the press got worked up over it, this is precisely the kind of situation that the press investigates very well when it wants to. But the way the press operates in the United States is they express the spectrum of opinions ... of the establishment, between the Democrats and the Republicans.

But right after the election, the Democrats once again joined with the Republicans — this is not an issue that they wanted to explore, the issue of the vote. And so the press simply didn't go further than the Democrats did. I mean, there's hardly an opposition party in this country and the press, which should be there to hold those in power accountable — and that's both parties — simply does their bidding, it simply acts as a conveyer belt for their lies.

So why does the corporate media allow the contours of the debate to be set by the Democrats and the Republicans?

I don't know why. I know that they do it. In the book I wrote with my brother, David Goodman, The Exception to the Rulers, we talk about the "access of evil." Bush talks about the "axis of evil," you know, we talk about the press' "Access of Evil" and that is trading truth for access in order to get the next... lie, in order to get the quote from the player himself, whether it's Rumsfeld, Bush or Cheney. They trade truth for access, and that's unacceptable.

Evan Derkacz is a New York-based writer and contributor to AlterNet.

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