It might surprise the corporate media in Birmingham, Alabama, to know that Amy Goodman of Democracy Now radio came to town this weekend and drew a crowd of about 350 mostly educated, progressive white folks to hear President George W. Bush and the mainstream media take a tongue-lashing like nothing that has been heard in these parts since George C. Wallace bashed the “pointy-headed liberals” in New York and Washington in the 1960s.
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| by Glynn Wilson |
| Amy Goodman speaks the unvarnished truth in Birmingham… |
Ms. Goodman, 48, who lives in New York and graduated from Harvard, might be surprised at the comparison. But if you have been around journalism and southern politics as long as I have, it works.
The difference is, the Birmingham News actually covered Wallace’s speeches in the 1960s, laced as they were with racial epithets.
It is a bit hard to know what the people in the crowd were thinking as some of them later debated over coffee or beer on Birmingham’s fashionable Highland Avenue whether or not to pay the New York Times $49.95 a year for online access to their premium content.
Did Ms. Goodman talk so fast that they did not get the point?
Goodman is an independent journalist like nothing anyone in Alabama or the American South has ever seen or heard in person (present company excluded of course).
As the historian C. Vann Woodward said about Alabama when he called it the closest thing to a totalitarian state in the nation during Wallace’s time, there is no bona fide tradition of democracy or an independent press here. It’s sort of like Iraq in that sense, a third-world country where it will be hard for any kind of workable democracy to ever take hold.
I caught up with Ms. Goodman at the Bare Hands Gallery reception before her presentation at UAB’s Alumni Auditorium. I asked her just a few of the questions on my mind since she was busy selling and signing books.
Having practiced all kinds of journalism myself for years and studied the advocacy verses objectivity debate as a research academic as well, I wanted to know how she handles the inevitable questions that must come up from those who find her point of view so different and maybe even refreshing compared to some of the claptrap on conservative talk radio and TV news.
She has a way of turning the question that works in person as well as it does on the radio and TV.
“I think it’s important to be fair and accurate. I think it is very important that we hear all sides on issues,” she said. “The corporate media advocates overwhelmingly for the state. So when the state goes to war, the media beats the drums for war. That has to be challenged.”
I asked her what she thought about the Bill Keller New York Times, which backs up star reporters such as Judith Miller even as she sits in jail for not revealing a source on a story she never wrote. The same Judith Miller who got away with using one bad anonymous source, who we now know as the discredited Ahmad Chalabi, to write story after story in the run up to war in Iraq claiming that Saddam Hussein’s regime had active weapons of mass destruction programs and constituted a “clear and present danger” to U.S. security.
While at the same time, the Times does not back up non-union non-staff reporters who right here in Birmingham tried to stand up to the Bush Justice Department as they botched the prosecution of Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth.
Earlier in the day, I did a survey on the street asking people reading the print edition of the New York Times in Southside bars what they thought of the paper these days.
One long-time reader outside Highlands Bar and Grill had a one-word answer: “Timid.”
But Ms. Goodman disagreed.
“If they were timid we would be in better shape,” she said. “They led the drumbeat for war and really set the agenda for the rest of the press in paving the way for the invasion of Iraq.”
In her new book, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media that Love Them, she includes two chapters on this issue. (If you have had a chance to read the book, feel free to post a review or a comment about this).
Her one-hour daily show, Democracy Now!, is produced by Pacifica Radio, what the mainstream press calls “a politically progressive public radio network that describes itself as ‘an independent community voice for peace and justice’.”
Ms. Goodman works according to a style and definition of objectivity I have come to call “scientifically objective journalism,” which basically means get the facts and tell the truth regardless of economic moitives and political sacred cows. That is not an easy thing to do in a country where scholars such as Noam Chomsky have talked for years about the limited range of debate allowed here, not totally unlike the state-owned media in the old Soviet Union.
Rather than falling into the trap of trying to defend advocacy journalism, a label used by the political right to keep the corporate media telling their lies on a daily basis without question, Ms. Goodman turns around and questions their objectivity.
For starters, does it surprise Americans to know that even CNN refuses to show the horrors of war in Iraq and allow the Bush administration and Pentagon to censor in this country the images of the dead and dying in Iraq that are seen on CNN International all the time?
Do the people of Birmingham realize that the same Pentagon is now harrassing reporters for trying to take pictures of dead bodies floatng in the New Orleans flood?
It seemed to come as news to the liberal crowd. They applauded her several times and even gave Ms. Goodman a standing ovation, then lined up to buy her book.
Editor’s Note: We are experiencing some technical difficulty with the conversion of the digital recording of Ms. Goodman’s speech and it may be Monday afternoon before our full coverage of this event will be posted.
But for a rush transcript of Ms. Goodman’s comments, a link to the movie shown at the event, and more information about the radio show and her books, here’s a link to the Democracy Now Web site.
It is Sunday, after all, and we need a break.
