Turning the dial left

>> U.S. broadcaster and author Amy Goodman brings her combative approach to American
news and newsmakers to Montreal

AN OBLIGATION TO BE CRITICAL: Goodman

by CHRISTOPHER HAZOU

On election day, 2000, U.S. President Bill Clinton called into Amy Goodman’s award-winning radio show, Democracy Now!, in New York City for a quick get-out-the-vote plug for Hillary, who was running for a New York Senate seat, and Al Gore, who was about to lose his bid for the presidency in spectacular fashion. Little did the normally imperturbable Clinton know what he was in for.

“If you have a chance to speak to the most powerful person on Earth, you have an obligation to ask the critical questions,” Goodman says over the phone from New York. “Besides, he called me, I didn’t call him.”

Half-an-hour later, after a barrage of queries covering everything from imprisoned native American activist Leonard Peltier to the death penalty, racial profiling, sanctions against Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Clinton managed to extract himself from Goodman’s journalistic clutches. But not before voicing his displeasure at the treatment accorded him.

“He called me ‘hostile, combative, and at times disrespectful,’” says Goodman. “Afterwards, the White House called and said that I would be banned.”

Such tenacity and dedication to the nobler aspects of her profession have made Goodman something of an indie media icon and folk hero to many. This week, she returns to Montreal to give the keynote speech at CKUT’s first annual media conference at McGill entitled “ReDefining Media: Media Democracy and Community Radio.” She’ll also be signing her most recent book, Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back, coauthored with her brother David.

Big names, heavy topics

For more than a decade, Goodman has been afflicting the comfortable and the powerful as host of DN, which is watched and listened to by millions on the Internet and airs on over 500 radio and television stations in the U.S. alone. Despite its left-wing leanings and Goodman’s hardnosed style, DN manages to attract some high profile, perhaps unexpected guests, such as former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and the aforementioned Clinton.

“DN is a very big broadcast in the U.S. It vies with the corporate networks,” Goodman says. “What’s important is that people get a fair hearing. Yes, they will be challenged, but they can complete a sentence, they can finish a thought, and we can have a serious debate.”

In 1991, Goodman and fellow journalist Allan Nairn were beaten and almost killed after witnessing the massacre of hundreds of East Timorese while covering Indonesia’s bloody repression of the tiny island nation’s independence movement. They would later win numerous awards for their documentary, Massacre: The Story of East Timor.

Closer to home, Goodman was broadcasting from DN’s converted firehouse studio just a few blocks from the World Trade Center the morning of September 11, 2001. As others fled and the twin towers collapsed, Goodman and company stayed put and on the air. “I didn’t leave the firehouse for days because we were inside the evacuation zone and we felt that it was absolutely critical to be broadcasting,” she says. “The environment was horribly toxic. You could taste the metal.”

Criticizing the findings of the official 9/11 commission, she’s called for a renewed investigation into the attacks and places the blame for the prevalence of conspiracy theories, at least in part, on the lack of a thorough inquiry. “What happened on 9/11 has never been fully or adequately investigated,” she says. “Certainly, the bi-partisan 9/11 commission didn’t do that job, so it’s left a lot of areas open for people to speculate about what happened.”

Looking for opposition

Goodman excoriates the state of U.S. politics, where the two major parties are virtually indistinguishable on most issues and collude to maintain their grip on power. She stresses the value of oppositional politics and laments its lack in contemporary America. “A democratic society needs opposing parties, not a party that engages in a war and another party that enables them,” she says. “[Especially] when you look at how high the stakes are, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and—if the administration has their way—in Iran.”

And while many are welcoming the possibility that Americans may elect their first black or female president in 2008, Goodman sounds an ambivalent note, preferring as usual to focus on substance rather than the superficiality of race or gender. “I think what matters is what their policies are, whoever the candidate is,” she says. “What matters is what they’ll do.”

At McGill’s Leacock Auditorium
(855 Sherbrooke W., rm 132) on
Friday, Oct. 19, 7 p.m., free. Info:
(514) 448-4041. For more on “ReDefining
Media” events, go to www.ckut.ca.