Last night I sat with over 400 other people from the northern Alabama area to hear Amy Goodman give her talk entitled "media-ocracy: How the American Media Compromises Democracy." It was Goodman's Alabama debut, as one of the introducers said. I wanted to stay home and just read, relax. I knew I had to go. I am grateful I went.
This is a brilliant, ethical woman and a master storyteller. She deals in facts: Steve Biko died the morning of September 12, East Timor became an independent country on 20 May 2002, a reporter in New Orleans reported on air as a dead body floated by behind him. But the way she tells those facts is storytelling. She uses poetry -- mainstream media as "the stenographers for power." She weaves the story across huge distances and time -- Democracy Now news on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, the pro- and anti-war guests on the Sally Jesse Raphael show during the Gulf War, the U.S.-backed Indonesian massacre of East Timor, a story that spanned three decades and one which Goodman reported on in 1991, when a UN delegation was supposed to visit, and she and Alan Nairn were beaten and almost killed along with close to 300 Timorese who were shot as they mourned the government murder of one of their community.
One of the most powerful moments was when Goodman recited a list of September 11ths - Biko, Pinochet, East Timor, and many more...and ended by saying that Sept. 11, 2001 was not the first time the U.S. was involved in terrorist attacks. She began each instance by saying "September 11, 1970" or "September 11, 1971," and the iterative moment, the repetition of the day followed by different years, shifted the current September 11th icon into context, out of mythology, away from propaganda.
Goodman talked about the difference in media between the invasion of Iraq and the coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She talked about how the invasion of Iraq became the "General Media," in which generals were paid consultants on mainstream media, and embedded journalists responded to questions with "Yes, sir." She told how the media titled its broadcasts with the exact same name the Pentagon used for the invasion: "Operation Iraqi Freedom." There is no democratic media when the military and the government dictate the script and the media reads it unedited. She talked about Cindy Sheehan in Crawford and other mothers who dared to go against the governmental ban against photographing the coffins of their dead children returning from war. And she contrasted the coverage of Katrina, where reporters were on the ground before the military, before FEMA, and were able to report without government muzzles. She told of being in Algiers this past week and interviewing a New York City firefighter who was on a firetruck with a local firefighter and asking him if he'd been at ground zero in New York, and he had. And she asked which ground zero was worse -- NY or New Orleans and he answered, "This one." Goodman quickly said "Not to compare disasters..." and she was clear that she believed Osama bin Laden should be found and tried and punished...but she said that Henry Kissinger should also be tried and punished for the invasion of East Timor and other crimes against humanity.
Goodman used humor ... when she was on the Sally Jesse Raphael program and Sally pointed to picture of people in NY City demonstrating against the Gulf War and then asked Goodman, "Who are all these people?" and Goodman replied, "Well, I don't know all their names..." At one point, Goodman was talking about the almost 340 days of vacation Bush has taken and the latest one that started the beginning of August when he spent his time relaxing, and fishing, and reading.. and some female voice in the audience, not too loudly but just audible, said "Reading?" and the whole place cracked up.
Some poll checked the four major news shows during the invasion of Iraq -- NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS (Macneill/Lehrer) -- for a period of time and out of almost 400 guests, a total of 3 represented anti-war/peace voices. That means that less than 1% of all guests/experts on all major news shows represented the non-governmental side. And that's her point. There is no democracy in media and it's our job, as she ended her talk, our job as citizens who wake up each morning and decide every day, every hour whether we will side with our country as a sword or as a shield, whether we will maintain that "war is not a solution to conflict in the twenty-first century."
The talk began with a showing of the DVD that features Goodman discussing coverage of the Iraqi invasion. This is the point: for every embedded journalist in the military, there needs to be an embedded journalist with the Iraqi people. And we must demand that democracy in media.
At one point, she said something like, "As the granddaugher of a rabbi, I am appalled at seeing Israeli children with gas masks. But I am more appalled at seeing Palestinian children without gas masks." She mentioned that her grandmother is 108 and still going strong. I'm hoping Goodman has her grandma's genes.
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