Amy Goodman: Reflection/Rretrospective

I have listened to independent radio station WBAI—and more specifically, Amy Goodman’s show Democracy Now!—since I was about seven. Did my young, unformed mind grasp the intellectual debates and impassioned discussion that rode the airwaves of such news media? Surely not. Yet I managed to catch slips of words that carried some secret, solemn significance: “peace and justice”, “activism” and, above all, “democracy”. Ingrained at a tender age was an approbation for the voices behind those words—particularly that of Amy Goodman’s.

Amy Goodman is a news journalist of the highest caliber. On February 21, 2007, I attended her lecture and book signing held at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism and afterwards spoke with her privately in a brief—and much sought after—interview. As I saw her in action, her voice ardent, steady, and clear, her fist pumping emphatically at the end of her speech, I knew I was in the presence of an extraordinary woman. Her slight frame and gentle demeanor belied a passion that was evident since the moment she spoke. “There’s got to be a media outlet, especially in times of war, that’s run by journalists and artists,” she avowed. During the lecture, she broached various topics that had surfaced during my research of her life and work: the threats of media consolidation, the need for relaying the “victim’s perspective”, the importance of transforming the public airwaves into a tool to “break the sound barrier” and provide a forum where the people could speak for themselves. Amy Goodman suddenly became very real to me, ceasing to be a voice without a face but rather a flesh-and-blood person who actively campaigned for her cause. As I heard murmurs of agreement and indignation ripple through the audience, I knew that her siren-call for media untouched by the sordidness of corruption and power-abuse was not lost on her listeners.

For me, researching the life of Amy Goodman has entailed a travel through the dark world of oppressive power and corporate control that quashes all nascent forms of dissent. During her lecture, she referred to that “veil of distortion and lies and misrepresentations and half-truths that obscure reality”. In my eyes, she has joined the ranks of those truth-seekers in history who have clamored for the tearing of that veil of falsehood and oppression. I discerned in her the same ideals that goaded on the great thinkers I dissected and discussed in my college classes: a passion for justice, a loathing of inequality. She referred to, in her speech, the need for a “uniform standard of justice” and an equal arraignment of “crimes against humanity”. She seemed to me democratic in the truest sense of the word—a voice box of the people, that silent majority.

At the end of the lecture, equipped with pen in hand and questions on the tip of my tongue, I eagerly confronted a slightly weary but kind-looking Amy Goodman. I was taken aback by how quickly the interview became a causal conversation; her responses were not wordy, empty, and stylized but succinct, humble and heartfelt. When asked how she would summarize her mission as a journalist, she responded, “To get more people to stand up for themselves.” As we talked, it seemed that her whole life had been a trajectory towards “social justice”, evolving from “first standing up to the principle, then the government”. I asked her how her work testified to the power of the individual. She told me that what she did was a team effort—she “could never do it alone”.

As we exited the lecture room and she placed a call to a friend on her cell, she seemed simultaneously very human and delightfully extraordinary, a strong woman of a penetrating mind who had chosen to dedicate herself to the pursuit of “going to where the silence is”. Hopefully more journalists, authors, and activists can take a cue from her and strive to do the same.