The nineties, the decade in which Amy Goodman co-founded her news program Democracy Now!, has been dubbed by some the “Merger Age”. Big conglomerates sprang to life like rabbits while a handful of transnational corporations reigned over the global media market, giving rise to the corporate elite that Goodman so fiercely contests. This boom in media consolidation served to exacerbate the already diminishing diversity of voices and opinions offered to the general public.
Violence and hostility infused many of the leading stories of the 1990s. Charges of police brutality surged in 1992, when South-Central Los Angeles was engulfed in riot after four white policemen were acquitted of assault charges for beating Rodney King. A year later, terrorism on American soil made public headlines as a bomb exploded in the garage beneath the World Trade Center. Four agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms were killed during an unsuccessful raid on the Branch Dividian cult compound in Waco, Texas. Americans by the droves tuned into the O.J. Simpson trial, which underscored America’s underlying racial tensions as blacks and whites clashed on the question of his innocence. A concern with racial equality surfaced that had been unmatched since the sixties, evidenced by such events as the Million Man March in 1995. In the same year, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City veiled America in grief and bewilderment as it was discovered that the perpetrators were not foreign terrorists but rather American citizens led by U.S. Army veteran Timothy McVeigh.
From approximately 1995 onward, the Internet assumed a more pervasive role in American life, influencing and eventually revolutionizing such spheres as business, communication, and shopping. The AIDS crisis emerged as one of the most urgent social issues of the decade; many pioneered efforts to inform and negate those who believed it to be a primarily “gay” phenomenon. Such issues as gay rights, abortion, and media censorship, which generally remained hidden from public awareness during the previous decade, emerged anew and kindled polarizing discussion. Overall, the nineties were a forum for debate over such issues as healthcare, gun control, immigration, and social security reform. The first cloned animal, Dolly the Sheep, was reported by the global media in 1997, inciting questioning regarding the ethics of human cloning efforts. Scandal tainted the White House as President Clinton iniquitous dealings with Monica Lewinsky stirred murmurs of moral condemnation and cries for impeachment. During the 1994 midterm election, Republicans seized control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time in forty years, hinting at a budding trend toward political conservatism that would reign in the United States.
At 8:45 AM on a Tuesday morning in 2001, an American Airlines Boeing 767 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The September 11 attacks will forever be etched in the public consciousness as the worst act of terrorism perpetuated on American soil. The ensuing “War on Terrorism” ushered in questions regarding detention policies, wire tapping policies, human rights violations and torture, subjects that have been inevitably broached by Amy Goodman during her news program and interviews. When the Iraq War began in 2003, Amy Goodman was among those who, from the start, cast doubt on the intelligence that spurred the U.S. invasion of Iraq under the pretext that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Providing a voice of dissent to counterbalance the unchallenged opinion of the “extreme press”, Goodman ignited controversy with her indictment of U.S. involvement in Iraq, but slowly drew a wider audience as public opinion grew increasingly critical of the war. Anti-war movements sprang up around the globe, uniting millions for peaceful protests. Goodman used her position as an independent media reporter to articulate a perspective shunned from the mainstream press—a press, according to her, that was “beating the drums for war”. In articulating this position, her news program Democracy Now! gained more momentum and more listeners than ever, representing a media source that refused to be a “conveyor belt for the lies of the [Bush] administration”. Throughout her career as a news journalist, Goodman has always endeavored to tell the unheard story, that story that has been buried in the era of extreme media consolidation. Not to provide a forum for debate and dissent is, after all, “…a disservice to the service men and women of this country -- a disservice to a democratic society”.
SOURCES USED:
http://kclibrary.nhmccd.edu/decade90.html
historychannel.com
wikipedia.com
http://www.echochamberproject.com/goodman
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