Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, an award-winning daily news program now airing on more than 1,500 public and community radio and television stations around the world. Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers, most recently Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America. We spoke by phone in early January.
Q: Democracy Now! is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary on February 19. Tell us where the program has gone during the past quarter-century.
Amy Goodman: When I first got the call to host Democracy Now!, I was at a safe house, covering the elections in Haiti. And there, people who announced for office would often be gunned down. People who went to the polls could be killed, but still the vast majority of Haitians would vote.
What does the pandemic show us? It shows us that inequality kills. That people’s lack of access to health care kills.
So when I got the call to host a daily election show, I was saying, “My God, we live in the most powerful country on Earth. But still most people do not vote.” I thought it would be fascinating to look at why people were not voting when their vote made a difference, not only in the United States but all over the world.
I never thought it was because of apathy. I wanted to find out what people were doing in their communities. That’s really what we did those nine months of the broadcast from just after Valentine’s Day in 1996. I really think of it as news with a heart.
After the election, we were going to fold up. We’d done our project. We had been the only daily election show in public media. We were broadcasting on nine community radio stations. But there was more demand for the show after the election, when President Bill Clinton was re-elected, than there was before. People really wanted to hear from the grassroots, those authentic voices, not those typical pundits you get on the networks who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong.
Q: Tell us about a memorable moment.
Goodman: The week of the terrorist attack, September 11, 2001, we were the closest national broadcast to Ground Zero. We were broadcasting that day in the evacuation zone, and I knew if we went out, the police would make us leave. And we felt it was critical to continue to broadcast the voices of people like, well, the late great historian, Howard Zinn, as the battle cry was coming from the White House.
Amy Goodman
In New York City, where thousands died at the World Trade Center, people were comforting each other, putting up signs on park benches and lampposts. “Have you seen my brother last seen in Tower One?” “Have you seen my aunt last seen in Tower Two?” And I thought about how similar these signs were to those carried by the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina, also the victims of terror. “Have you seen my granddaughter? Have you seen my grandson?”
I thought about another 9/11, which we were going to be doing a special on that day. On September 11, 1973, the forces of Augusto Pinochet rose to power in Chile and Salvador Allende, the democratically elected leader, died in the [presidential] palace in Santiago and the Pinochet forces rose to power. They would ultimately kill thousands of Chileans in the coming years with his iron-fisted rule.
So we were united with people around the world who were victims of terror. And we just kept broadcasting the voices of people who were calling for peace, an end to the cycles of violence that were so destructive.
Q: Can you talk about how Democracy Now! uses multi-platform distribution to reach people wherever they are, whether it be through TV, radio, email, or the web?
Goodman: From the beginning, we had to use the Internet because it was another means of communicating with people. I never felt, “Oh, people should flock to us.” We had to go to where they were. We didn’t have the resources that the networks had to send our show through satellites. We needed the Internet, and we perfected a way not only to send—this was before the word podcast—the radio show to different stations all over the world.
We also perfected a way for TV stations to run broadcast-quality video from our website. And that made an enormous difference. From the beginning, we had a website. Time magazine, I remember, in those years poured $20 million into a website, and put up a paywall. We were saying, “Steal this story, please.”
The whole idea was people speaking for themselves. The media is 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: war and peace, life and death, inequality, equality, racial economic justice, LGBTQ issues, the climate crisis. And of course, now, overall respect for science in dealing with the pandemic and issues of equity along the way.
I really did feel that those who care about war and peace, those who care about social and economic justice, all of these issues are not a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media, which is why we have to take the media back. We had to then, and we have to today.
Q: Nowadays, there is talk about “citizen journalists” and all the networks are using them. But Democracy Now! was a pioneer in that as well, having people on the ground in places where things were happening, whether it be anti-globalization protests or the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003.
Goodman: That’s right. They weren’t getting past the corporate media gatekeepers, but on Democracy Now! we were talking to people on the ground. After the terror attacks of 9/11, you have the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. We were on the ground, covering the anti-war movements during the lead-up to the war in Iraq, when millions of people rocked the globe for peace. And yet President George W. Bush decided to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.
We were there, talking not only to people in the United States but around the world, talking to people in Iraq at the target-end of U.S. policy, people who were running from those bombs.
It is the role of the media to go to where the silence is and, so often, it is not silent there. It is loud, it is raucous, people are organizing. It just doesn’t hit the corporate media radar screen, particularly in the United States. And that’s what we were trying to do, break the sound barrier.
Q: How is Democracy Now!, as a news program, different from something like MSNBC?
Goodman: Democracy Now! has been at the United Nations’ climate summits every year since 2009, from Copenhagen, to Durban, to Doha, to Peru, to Paris. We were there on the ground. Often the only daily national broadcast from the climate summit back to the United States (and around the world because we’re a global news organization). And it was absolutely critical to bring out the voices of people in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Pacific Islanders, and so many others who are on the front lines of the climate crisis and to project those voices back to the United States.
And in 2016, in the United States, there was this global movement happening in North Dakota. It was led by Indigenous people, it was the Standing Rock Sioux fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline. And thousands of people, particularly Indigenous people from Latin America, and from Canada, joined together with those in the United States and their non-Native allies fighting against pipeline politics for a more sustainable future.
We went there on Labor Day to see this remarkable movement. And ultimately, after we left and showed this horrific scene on Labor Day weekend—with Native Americans protesting the desecration of their grave sites for the pipeline to be built, standing in front of the bulldozers—we filmed when the Dakota Access Pipeline guards unleashed dogs on the protesters. We showed the dog with its mouth and its nose dripping with blood. These images [drew] something like fourteen million views in twenty-four hours.
President Obama would soon call a halt to the building of that pipeline. When we came back to New York, the North Dakota authorities issued an arrest warrant for me. This was outrageous. I think it was a threat to journalists. It was a warning saying, “Do not come to North Dakota.” Which is why we had to challenge all of it and have it all dropped. But it is the job of journalists to go and show these battles over the critical issues of our day.
Look at what Trump managed to do with the networks. For a while, Fox News was “Trump TV.” Now it is not conservative enough for him, not rightwing enough for him. So he’s moved on to Newsmax and to One America Network. But what he did with CNN and MSNBC is he named them, as well as The New York Times. He named the reporters. He constantly attacked them. And so these networks found their backbone. They fought back. They defended themselves.
And that was extremely important. It started to sound like Democracy Now! under any administration. We are not supposed to be on bended knee. When it comes to covering power, we are not a part of the parties, we are apart from them. It puts us in a very uncomfortable position, but that is our job as journalists. We have to hold those in power accountable. That’s the role of independent media. That’s the role of the media, protecting a democratic society.
Q: What does Democracy Now! plan to do in terms of holding the incoming Biden Administration accountable, particularly for the progressive promises in his platform?
Goodman: We will continue to give voice to the grassroots, to provide a forum for people to speak for themselves. The debate is not only between Republicans and Democrats, it’s within the parties. With the Democratic party, you have an extremely strong, progressive base. One of the largest caucuses in the House of Representatives is the Progressive Caucus. You see it with the Biden Cabinet and the people he’s naming—when he succumbs to pressure, when he doesn’t.
Biden said that he would veto a bill for Medicare for All. And now we have gone through the pandemic. And what does the pandemic show us? It shows us that inequality kills. That people’s lack of access to health care kills. And that we have to have a system. When you look at the countries that have done better than us, let’s look at the industrialized countries. In each case, they have a universal health-care system.
And so I think we are operating in very different terrain right now. The issue of the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on African Americans, on the Latinx population, on Native Americans, is extremely important. It is a flashing light for why it is essential that health care is guaranteed for everyone in this country, the most powerful country on Earth.
Q: What do you see as the future of independent media, in general, and what plans do you have for Democracy Now! in the coming year and beyond?
Goodman: It is more essential than ever to have these debates about another world being possible. And when we see the diversity, when we see the youth entering Congress and also leaders on the streets, not only of this country, but in movements all over the world, it is critical to give voice to them. I’m afraid the networks will shut down at this point, as that revolving door that we’re so familiar with continues in such a big way between the networks, the newspapers that have survived, and the administration.
We need something completely independent that grapples with the critical issues of the day and broadens the base of who is involved in those discussions. There are so many solutions, creative answers out there, and we need to ensure that there is a broad, global forum for them to be debated. And I see Democracy Now!, this daily grassroots, global, unembedded, independent, international, investigative news hour in this way.
We are, right now, really at one of the strongest points when it comes to people turning to independent media for authentic voices, voices they can trust. And I encourage people to support Democracy Now!, to support The Progressive, and to support independent media in the United States and around the world.