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Democracy Now! Amy Goodman Rocks the House

When a group of students recently asked me to host an evening event on “hypocrisy and democracy,” I said yes, but reluctantly. I cherish democracy but I hate things at night when I’d rather cuddle up with a book or a TV show. More importantly, I hate worrying that events I host will not draw much of a crowd. Who would turn out on the night before Halloween to hear people talk about Venezuela and Haiti and reforming the media that covers such faraway places?

So, when I entered the large lecture hall to introduce the panel and saw hundreds of people streaming in, I was amazed. At New Paltz it is tough to draw fleas to evening events, especially ones that tackle the thorny and complex aspects of democracy, the much abused word that is at the heart of our civilization.

But here it was, a week before Election Day, and people were flocking to see Jeff Cohen, a fiery goateed lawyer from Woodstock who was a Progressive commentator for 13 years on cable TV news talk to them about, of all places, Venezuela.

And, of course, they were also there, mostly, to see Amy Goodman, this petite Harvard-educated woman from Long Island who can be, in her soft spoken way, as fiery a critic and advocate as anyone on the political scene today. She weaves real stories about real people into the fabric of national events in ways that make her mesmerizing – and a cult hero.

I have twice seen Goodman, the heralded host of “Democracy Now.” Her star quality is fascinating. She arrived late this evening as the audience listened to three other speakers. When she entered, someone whispered to me, “Amy is here.” And when she was spotted a buzz went through the audience. Dressed in her typical black tunic and wearing gloves cut off at the fingers, she took a seat out of eyesight. I could not wait for her to talk. I knew she would hold the audience rapt, even though it was nearing 10 o’clock at night. And I could not wait for her to glide gracefully to the end of the speech, pause, and then knife her hand through the air, declaring, “Democracy Now.”

Both times I have seen her, she received standing ovations. After the one the other night, she walked quickly to the back of the lecture room, and sat on a chair, her legs coiled around each other, signing books for dozens of fans, who seemed to want to just get close to the woman they listen to on radio as she brings us voices we never hear.

And she does it without a polemical style, without ranting about her opinion. She does it simply by asking good questions, to the point, and letting her guests – Cindy Sheehan, Seymour Hersh, a Muslim congressman, Iraqi military dissenters, soldiers who hate this war – talk quietly about an alternative view of the world, the one we so rarely get from most of the mainstream press.

And little by little Goodman has become a trusted source, not a propagandist who rails and bellows, like Limbaugh or O’Reilly, so full of themselves, so hypocritical with their hidden sexual perversions and drug addictions. The Nation magazine recently headlined an article about her: “Amy Goodman’s Empire.” At first I resented that headline. It conjures images of might and imperialism. But she is putting together an empire, with two best-selling books, a talk show that goes across the nation and has extended to television, and with appearances on mainstream media outlets

“So you are a communist,” Colbert asked her when she appeared on his farcial TV show. (She is not by the way; she is a populist crusading muckraking Progressive who dislikes authoritarians of both corporate and political stripes.) The Colbert program was almost uncomfortable, not because Goodman is humorless. She was talking about dead soldiers and he was yucking it up. She did not bite on humor. She talked important stuff. Death is not very funny.

Goodman is coming off a multi-city book tour now, as she promotes Static, Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back. But she keeps doing her radio show each day. The night she came to New Paltz she was still signing books when I left at 10:20 and she was back in the studio early the next morning. So I wonder where the energy comes from in this little dynamo. But great people are great, at least in part, because they dig down deeper than the rest of us. Maybe what compels her are the world’s wounds. The night she spoke at New Paltz, her friend, the journalist Bradley Roland Will, had just been killed by police in Oaxaca, Mexico, and she seemed genuinely aggrieved and wounded when she spoke. God knows, if more of our elected officials felt wounded by the 650,000 dead in Iraq, or the 20,000 American soldiers maimed by this war, maybe then the killing would stop.

But back to Amy Goodman who almost met the same fate as Bradley Will in 1991. I first learned of Goodman when one of my students brought her to campus to speak. I could not attend but I heard about it from animated and charged-up students who told me Goodman’s story. In 1985 she started as a talk show host at the non-profit alternative radio station WBAI in New York City.

She and a colleague, Allen Nairn, went to East Timor, a small island country in Southeast Asia to watch a nascent democracy movement. The country’s authoritarian government was backed by Indonesia, which in turn was backed by the United States. Goodman was covering a citizens uprising when soldiers attacked both her and Nairn -- for having the audacity to provide coverage of their fascist tactics. They severely beat them both. Goodman returned home, bloodied but not unbowed, as she began to help sway world opinion against the dictators. Her documentary on the episode won a slew of journalism prizes, and her courage did not go unnoticed.

A legend was born out of the episode. Not that Goodman planned it. She seems a private person who is comfortable before a microphone but who always seems to have the outrage that the true muckraker and press pariah needs to have.

When her talk at New Paltz ended, I was walking towards my car and caught up with a woman, maybe 60 years old, who was at the event. She was dressed like a business person yet here she was, on a Monday night, nearing midnight, listening to a person whose politics can only be described as far out of the American political norm. It was dark, as I sidled up near her, and I did not want he to be alarmed.

“Hi there.”

She turned, smiled. “Oh, good show. You did a nice job.” She was referring to my modest introductions and opening statement, which said, in essence, that the crazies in the White House have made this a very scary time for us all.

“Thanks,” I replied, “but what about Amy. She was and is something.”

She signed my book, the woman gushed, almost breathless. “I told her she should run for president.”

But Amy laughed, and told me, ‘I run FROM presidents.’” We both chuckled. It is too bad I thought. She is far better than what we now have. Jon Stewart was recently told he too should run for president. And he replied, “That is truly scary, it says how bad it is in Washington right now.”

But he is only half-correct. It is bad in Washington but the true breaths of fresh air these days are coming from the alternative. Jeff Cohen, who spoke before Goodman, has a terrific new book (www.jeffcohen.org) that details how impossible it is to be politically progressive on today’s television stations and how news stations run from possibly being labeled as liberal. It used to be you ran from being labeled as a communist. But the political right has so cowed the media that to be progressive is sinful.

And that is why we have to look increasingly to the alternative, to those outside the MSNBC-General Electric-ABC-Disney-CNN-AOL-Time-Warner cabal. We need to turn to the Amy Goodmans. And we need to see the picture she is painting of an America that is not evil, that is not composed of warmongers.

I wish Hudson Valley public radio carried Goodman, so as to increase her audience but nonetheless we can hear her voice and the voiceless people she legitimizes each day if only at Democracy Now. I happen to receive a personal Goodman summary each day since my wife gets an Ipod download of “Democracy Now” and she often fills me in at breakfast. I also get e-mails about the program’s contents

Goodman’s “empire” will keep expanding, and that is a good thing because the truth often comes from the fringes before it reaches the mainstream. Eventually, the truth about the Bush White House and this war will come out, and when it does we will chase the rascals out of high places. In the meantime, I am going to keep slicing my hand through the air, like Amy does, and muttering to anyone within earshot, “Democracy Now.”

Rob Miraldi is an author and journalist who has taught journalism at SUNY New Paltz for 24 years.

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