Background and career
Amy Goodman (born April 13, 1957) is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Since 1996, Goodman has been the main host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, an independent global news program that she co-founded; it is broadcast daily and syndicated nationally on radio, television, and the Internet, including transcription. On the award-winning program, Goodman elevates voices and perspectives rarely covered in US corporate media. Highlights of Goodman's investigative journalism career include coverage of the Santa Cruz massacre and the East Timor independence movement, the Chevron Corporation's assistance to armed forces in Nigeria, the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests and anti-globalization activism, the American political prisoner in Peru Lori Berenson, and the US-backed 2004 Haitian coup d'état. Goodman has received awards for her work, including the Thomas Merton Award in 2004, a Right Livelihood Award in 2008, and an Izzy Award in 2009 for "special achievement in independent media". In 2012, Goodman received the Gandhi Peace Award for a "significant contribution to the promotion of an enduring international peace". Goodman is the author of six books, including the 2012 The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, and the 2016 Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America. In 2014, she was awarded the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard University's Nieman Foundation. In her field reporting, Goodman has faced attacks and arrest, including in Dili in 1991, Minnesota in 2008, and North Dakota in 2016.
Amy Goodman grew up in Bay Shore, New York, on Long Island, to secular Jewish parents who were active in social action groups. Her father, George Goodman, was an ophthalmologist. Her mother, Dorothy Goodman, was a literature teacher and later a social worker. She has two brothers, David Goodman and Steven N. Goodman. Goodman's maternal grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi. Her maternal grandmother was born in Rivne, present day Ukraine. Goodman graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1975. She attended Radcliffe College at Harvard University, took time off during which she studied at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, then returned, graduating with a degree in anthropology in 1984.
Goodman produced the evening news program for WBAI, a Pacifica Radio community station in New York City, for 10 years. In 1991, covering the East Timor independence movement, Goodman and fellow journalist Allan Nairn reported that they were badly beaten by Indonesian soldiers after witnessing the Santa Cruz massacre, a mass killing of East Timorese pro-independence demonstrators during the US-backed Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Goodman and Nairn produced the award-winning 1992 radio documentary Massacre: The Story of East Timor, about the event, later set to video.
Goodman co-founded the program Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report, which premiered in 1996. Since then, Goodman has hosted and produced the program. It became a flagship of Pacifica Radio, which was founded by Lewis Hill in 1949. Democracy Now! has been described as "probably the most significant progressive news institution that has come around in some time" by professor and media critic Robert McChesney. In 1998, Goodman and journalist Jeremy Scahill documented Chevron Corporation's role in a confrontation between the Nigerian Army and villagers who had seized oil rigs and other equipment belonging to oil corporations. Two villagers were shot and killed during the standoff. On May 28, 1998, the company provided helicopter transport to the Nigerian Navy and Mobile Police (MOPOL) to their Parabe oil platform, which had been occupied by villagers who accused the company of contaminating their land. Soon after landing, the Nigerian military shot and killed two of the protesters, Jola Ogungbeje and Aroleka Irowaninu, and wounded 11 others. Chevron spokesperson Sola Omole acknowledged that the company transported the troops. Omole said that Chevron management had requested troops from the government to protect their facility. The documentary made by Goodman and her colleagues, Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, won the George Polk Award in 1998. In 2000, amid conflicts regarding control of Pacifica that threatened the stability of the program's platform, Goodman negotiated greater independence for the program by pioneering a national, collaborative multimedia model to offer independent coverage of the political conventions of the 2000 United States presidential election. Democracy Now! thus expanded as a daily program broadcast across different media platforms, without advertisements and with support from foundations and listener contributions. Its website had 50,000 daily visits, its annual budget reached $1.8 million, and its staff grew to 27. Democracy Now! was dedicated to journalism in the style of George Seldes and Seymour Hersh.
When President Bill Clinton called WBAI on Election Day 2000 for a quick get-out-the-vote message, Goodman and WBAI's Gonzalo Aburto challenged him for 28 minutes with human rights questions about AIM activist Leonard Peltier, racial profiling, the Iraq sanctions, Ralph Nader, the death penalty, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the normalization of relations with Cuba, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Clinton defended his administration's policies and said that Goodman was "hostile and combative".
In 2001, the show was temporarily pulled off the air, as a result of a conflict between some Pacifica Radio board members and staff members and listeners over the direction of the station. During that time, it moved to a converted firehouse, from which it broadcast from January 2002 for nearly eight years, until November 13, 2009. Democracy Now! subsequently moved to a studio located in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. Goodman credits the program's success to the "huge niche" left by coverage of mainstream media organizations. Michael Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, said of Goodman: "She's not an editorialist. She sticks to the facts... She provides points of view that make you think, and she comes at it by saying: 'Who are we not hearing from in the traditional media?'"
