With the bad news we've been talking about on the public broadcasting front, it's worth pointing out a bright spot: On Monday (10/24/11), Charlie Rose featured a discussion of Occupy Wall Street with Chris Hedges and Amy Goodman.

Goodman made an important point about media coverage of the protests:

CHARLIE ROSE: Does it have anything in common with the Tea Party?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it's interesting you ask that. When the people gathered on September 16 and 17--what, 2000 people--hardly any coverage they got. If it was 2000 Tea Party activists who gathered on Wall Street, I would dare said there would have been 2,000 reporters there, if not more.

Watch the segment on the Charlie Rose website. And you can leave a comment there--as others already have--noting that it's refreshing to see these voices on a show that doesn't usually feature such guests.

Independent investigative journalist John Pilger recently (7/6/09) gave Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman his view of the broad media landscape, informed by the fact that "we have many alternative sources of information now, not least of all your own program, though I wouldn't call that alternative":

But for most people, the primary source of their information is the mainstream. It is mainly television. Even the Internet, for all its subversiveness, is still a very large component of the mainstream. And that means we're getting still this singular message about wars, about the economy, about all those things that touch our lives. All we are getting is what I would call a contrived silence, a censorship by omission. I think this is almost the principal issue of today, because without information, we cannot possibly begin to influence government. We cannot possibly begin to end the wars.

All of this, it seems to me, has come together in the presidency of Barack Obama, who is almost a creation of this media world. He promised some things, although most of them were more for us, and has delivered virtually the opposite. He started his own war in Pakistan. We see the events in Iran and Honduras as quite subtly, but very directly, influenced in the time-honored way by the Obama administration. And yet the Obama administration is still given this extraordinary benefit of the doubt by people, who in my view are influenced by the mainstream media.

Still, with all the non-corporate media available today, Pilger sees this as "a time when. I think, where either we are going to begin to understand how the media really works, or we're going to let that opportunity pass." For more views on what Pilger calls "almost a historic opportunity that we understand that the perception of our world is utterly distorted" by so-called "mainstream" news providers, listen to the latest FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Jim Naureckas on the Future of Journalism" (7/10/09).

The unlikely news source Voice of America (6/15/09) has Adam Phillips' profile of Amy Goodman and "the largest public media collaboration in the United States," Democracy Now!, in which Goodman lays out "her job as a journalist" as "to bring out 'the voices of people closest to the story at the grassroots'":

In Goodman's program, as well as in her column and the three bestselling books she has co-authored with her brother, David Goodman, she also accuses the mainstream media of dangerous laziness in its reliance on so-called "pundits."

"We need to bring out the voices of people who think outside the box, [and include] creative thinkers, [and] people at the grassroots, who know exactly what they're talking about, because they've experienced policy in a very real way," she says. "These are the stories we have to tell until they can tell their own."

The great disparity between complicit corporate reportage and Democracy Now!'s invaluable muckraking is boiled down to one crucial observation: "The media's job is 'to serve democratic society,' she adds 'not to win a popularity contest.'" Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Amy Goodman on The Exception to the Rulers" (5/21/04).

Amy Goodman recently interviewed independent journalist Jeremy Scahill on her Democracy Now! show (5/19/09) regarding the fact that, in Scahill's words, "while much of the focus has been on the tactical use of torture at Guantánamo, almost no attention had been paid to a parallel force" known as the Immediate Reaction Force. Describing the methods of this "thug squad that is used to mercilessly punish prisoners"--"They go in, and they hogtie the prisoner... douse them with chemical agents.... They've squeezed their testicles.... They've taken the feces from one prisoner and smeared it in the face of another prisoner"--Scahill tells us the results, and their reaction:

In February of this year, about a month after Obama was inaugurated, there were 16 prisoners on a hunger strike at Guantánamo. The ...Immediate Reaction Force was used to go in and violently shove massive tubes down their noses into their stomachs.... They would use no anesthetics or any painkillers, shove this massive tube by force down their nose into their stomach and then yank it out. Some prisoners have described this as torture, torture, torture. And many have passed out from the sheer pain of this operation.

When Scahill mentions that "this force has received almost no scrutiny in the U.S. Congress or the U.S. media and operates at this moment," Goodman wonders, "How do you know about this?" It turns out Scahill used a little-known tactic called "reporting": "I discovered these teams, because I've been covering the investigation being done by Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain into the Bush torture system":

And yet, the only time when it's really made any kind of a flash in the corporate media was when a U.S. soldier, a young guy named Sean Baker... was ordered, he says, by his superiors to dress up in an orange jumpsuit and play the part of a restive or combative detainee at Guantánamo. He was told that the team that was going to come in to handle him knew that he was a U.S. soldier, knew that it was a training drill, and he was given a word, a codeword, "red," that when he said it, the beating was supposed to stop.... He describes them just mercilessly beating him, and he's yelling out "Red!" and they continue to beat him, even after he then said, "I'm a U.S. soldier! I'm a U.S. soldier!"

And the fate of not-even-real-prisoner Baker?--he "has permanent brain damage, suffers from multiple seizures, and had actually sued Rumsfeld and other officials because of his treatment."

The current Democracy Now! (5/8/09) features New York Times Pentagon Pundits reporter David Barstow giving Amy Goodman the background on the U.S. military's retraction of a report clearing itself of domestic propaganda wrongdoing:

So the report comes out in January, and it effectively exonerated the program. Now, one thing your viewers should know is that as soon as the stories ran, the program itself was suspended by the Pentagon, pending the outcome of this investigation. But what happened earlier this week was really unusual. It really is very rare for the inspector general of the Defense Department to rescind and repudiate and, in fact, even withdraw the report from its own website.

And the reason why they did is because after the report was released, it became pretty clear that there were significant problems with it, significant factual problems with it. The one that jumped out to me immediately as I read through the report for the first time was that it listed one particular general who I had written an awful lot about, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who's probably the preeminent military analyst for NBC and MSNBC. They listed him as having absolutely no ties to any defense contractors.

In a piece of reality too large for even the Pentagon to deny, the most prominent paper in the U.S. had published Barstow's "5,000 words that detailed tie after tie after tie he had to defense contractors" as board-member, consultant and adviser--which much corporate media apparently cared little about, offering as they do, to this day, a platform for propaganda-worker McCaffrey's conflicted views.

Interviewing Progressive magazine editor Matt Rothschild on Democracy Now! (5/1/09), Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman get the now 100-year-old magazine's high-minded take on the threatened existence of other periodicals:

Rothschild: Well, the magazine industry is in crisis. The newspaper industry is in crisis. A lot of the news weeklies don’t know how to function right now; the idea that you have a Newsweek magazine right now, that's antiquated. That's a dinosaur. People get the news within minutes or hours; they don’t need to go find it a week later as to what happens. So the intellectual reason for being for these magazines is kind of kaput. And their economic model is kaput, too.

So I think magazines, to the extent that they're going to be able to survive and the Progressive is going to be able to survive, need to become more like books or need to take a higher altitude look at the news and do investigative reporting and give people analysis that they can't find anywhere else. But if you just say what did Barack Obama say at his press conference yesterday, newspapers and magazines are going to go.

The "cardinal principles" to which Rothschild ascribes his publication's longevity: "We're still fighting corporate power. We're still fighting for civil liberties and human rights and against these foreign interventions that just help the corporations."

On the occasion of the first annual Izzy Awards from Jeff Cohen's Park Center for Independent Media, the son of progressive journalism icon I.F. Stone, Jeremy Stone (Consortium News, 4/1/09), describes Stone's most journalistically valuable quality--"his capacity for thinking independently"--along with its rewards and consequences:

In the McCarthy era, because he spoke in defense of Jeffersonian principles, people were afraid to be seen with him. When he supported the rights of Palestinians, Jewish institutions would not invite him to speak. And when the National Press Club refused to serve his black guest lunch, he quit the club, isolating himself from his colleagues....

Today's Izzy Award winners do have points of resemblance to I.F. Stone. Glenn Greenwald is a close reader of official documents and a principled critic of the tendency of the Executive Branch to exceed its rightful powers. He has been a fearless critic of government officials and complacent reporters. He has shown a willingness to challenge conventional pieties, including unthinking support for Israeli hardliners.

Amy Goodman's career also has similarities. She speaks up for the disenfranchised and gives her audience facts they don't hear from the traditional media. She is an investigative journalist and writes often about human rights.

Jeremy goes on to identify a key factor in Goodman's success: "Like I. F. Stone and his weekly, she founded a vehicle, Democracy Now!, that takes no advertising or money from corporations or government. She confronts authority no matter how high."

FAIR founder Jeff Cohen's Park Center for Independent Media has decided to give its new Izzy Award (3/4/09) "for special achievement in independent media" to Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman, specifically lauding the "two pillars of independent journalism" for "pathbreaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception and controversial issues":

Week after week, in meticulously documented and detailed blog posts, [Salon's Glenn Greenwald] skewers hypocrisy, deception and revisionism on the part of the powers that be in government and the media.... With devastatingly crisp arguments, Greenwald has inveighed against torture and defended constitutional rights for all, whether they be "enemy combatants" or American protesters. He has toughly criticized both Republicans and Democrats, and his blogging frequently sparks debate in major media and on Capitol Hill.

Over the past 12 years, Amy Goodman has built Democracy Now! into the largest public media collaboration--it can be found on television, radio and the Internet--in the country.... Democracy Now! offers a daily cutting-edge broadcast featuring issues, experts and debates rarely heard in corporate media, including the voices of both policymakers and those affected by policy. Through timely interviews with heads of state, opposition leaders, artists and organizers, Goodman in 2008 maintained an ongoing, tenacious focus on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. violations of the Geneva Conventions, racial justice issues such as the still-displaced poor of New Orleans, and political repression overseas.

The Izzy Award itself "is named after the legendary dissident journalist Isidor Feinstein 'Izzy' Stone, who launched his muckraking newsletter I.F. Stone's Weekly in 1953 during the height of the McCarthy witch hunts." An influential figure in the formation of FAIR's journalistic ideology, "Stone, who died in 1989, exposed government deceit and corruption while championing civil liberties, racial justice and international diplomacy." See our 20th Anniversary issue of Extra!: "On the Shoulders of Giants: The unbroken tradition of press criticism" (1-2/06) by Robin Andersen.

In a discussion with Jessica Newman of Campus Progress (2/17/09), Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman gives her motivations for entering journalism: "I just always saw it as a way to pursue issues of social justice, to hold those in power accountable, to really work hard to get at the truth." When asked if she sees "a successful and profitable way to embrace multimedia...in a for-profit system, like the mainstream media," Goodman makes an important distinction: "It depends on what you mean by a 'for-profit system'":

For the profit of society, yes. I can only speak from my own experience with what we do. [I] deeply believ[e] that we need to work on every kind of platform to get independent information out, which is why we're on community radio and NPR, Pacifica radio and PBS and public access TV and then on the Internet. We believed from the very beginning in working online and open source so that everyone can get information out there.... When we're on a station, it's bringing attention to that station, bringing resources to that station. Public access is under threat in the United States. You know, the telecoms and the cable companies don't want to have these free channels. But they're the ones--the cable companies--that get the monopoly in a town to have their cable network. They've got to give something back to the community. What better way to serve a community than to provide a space where people can make their own media, because the media are the most powerful institutions on earth.

In response to the old question of "what line as journalists should we draw between advocacy and objectivity," Goodman points out: "You really can’t become more of an advocate than the corporate press. They provide the model. Just look at the lead-up to the invasion [of Iraq in 2003]. All of the networks, over and over again, beating the drums for war. I know what every one of those journalists thinks because they talked about it all the time." See the FAIR article: "In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphones for Official Views" (3/18/03)