The Other Side Of News
By Ammu Joseph
13 July, 2004
The Hindu
"One hundred years ago today, author and journalist George Orwell was born. We'll spend the hour hearing excerpts from his classic work, 1984. The book introduced the terms `Big Brother', `thought police', `newspeak' and `doublethink'. We'll also hear clips from President George Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Fox News' Bill O' Reilly, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Senator Robert Byrd and broadcast footage of Donald Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam Hussein in 1983."That was Amy Goodman, co-host of Democracy Now! (DN!), introducing the June 25, 2003 edition of the habitually hard-hitting news and current affairs programme on radio and, more recently, television. Once aired exclusively on Pacifica Radio, the oldest listener-supported, non-profit broadcaster in the United States, DN! is arguably the most high-profile show on the five-station network. It is currently broadcast by approximately 140 stations. According to Goodman, "We are now the largest public media collaboration in the country... broadcasting on Pacifica Radio, community radio stations and National Public Radio stations around the country, and also on satellite television, Free Speech TV, and public access TV stations around the country."
Coinciding as it did with the anniversary of the day India woke up to its brief tryst with dictatorship nearly three decades ago, the above broadcast — headlined "The Two Georges, Orwell and Bush" — and its anti-fascism theme may have had a special resonance here had it been available on the airwaves (affirmed as public property by the Supreme Court of India in 1995). But with indigenous radio still caught between the devil of government control over news and current affairs, and the deep sea of popular entertainment programming on private FM channels, such offbeat programmes are at present accessible in the country only through the Internet (www.democracynow.org).
Even in the U.S. not everyone has heard of Pacifica, DN! or Amy Goodman. And, among those who have, many dismiss the alternative radio network, founded in 1949 by pacifists in Berkeley, California, and its stations, such as KPFA in Berkeley and WBAI in New York, as too partisan, left-leaning and radical. However, for at least a significant minority, DN! and its "War & Peace Report", as well as other Pacifica programmes such as the Free Speech Radio News bulletins (accessible on www.fsrn.org), provide vital windows to a world that is barely visible or audible in the mainstream media.
Goodman believes that Pacifica Radio and the show she co-hosts with New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzales are reaching out to "the silenced majority — those who are silenced by the corporate media". During the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq "more than half the people in the country were opposed to the war even if half the media were for it," she points out. "The media can either shore up a democracy or subvert it. Our role is to make dissent commonplace — that makes everyone safer."
Her confidence in the programme's reach does not seem too misplaced. Walking down to the subway near Port Authority and Times Square in Manhattan at the end of a late-night interview (after which she was returning to work as usual), we heard someone tentatively calling out: "Amy?" When she turned around to acknowledge the salutation, it became clear that the person looking so pleased to see her was not a long-lost friend but a perfect stranger who knew her only through her programme. He was casually leaning against a wall with a friend, wearing a Yankees T-shirt, and evidently not a member of the liberal or intellectual "elite" often assumed to be the primary audience of the alternative media. According to her, this kind of encounter had become more commonplace since DN! began to be televised.
The magazine-format show put together every weekday by the two award-winning journalists and their team of 10 full-time and some part-time staff, features a mix of investigative scoops (a small example: DN! had cast doubts on the Private Jessica Lynch rescue story long before the BBC exposed the media manipulation involved in it), reports from foreign correspondents (including "unembedded" journalists in the war zone during the invasion of Iraq), and interviews with a wide range of experts and commentators, including Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Robert Fisk and John Pilger.
Goodman pulls no punches as she takes on the politically high and mighty, irrespective of party, on the programme billed as the "Exception to the Rulers". For example, on the eve of the U.S. elections in 2000, it was "the only radio station to grab Bill Clinton by the coattails when he called in to make an election pitch", as Bharati Sadasivam reported in The Village Voice during a period of internal turmoil within Pacifica. Goodman apparently used the opportunity of Clinton's casual phone call to grill the then president for a good half hour on topics such as the corporate domination of politics, the U.S. bombing of Vieques, and the impact of U.S. sanctions on Iraqi children.
As preparations for the next round of elections get under way, George Bush can most certainly expect to be hauled over the coals. "As President Bush and (Senior White House adviser) Karl Rove launch the largest political fundraising campaign in history, women's rights advocates join forces with the peace movement to protest today's fundraiser in NYC," reported DN! on June 23. The demonstration, led by Planned Parenthood and United for Peace and Justice, is likely to have benefited from the announcement on the programme of the venue and timings, enabling citizens wishing to participate to do so.
Most of the anti-war rallies held in the U.S. during the first quarter of the year were also similarly publicised on the programme.
According to Matthew Lasar, author of Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network, quoted in Sadasivam's piece, "Democracy Now! is without question the most successful venture in the history of alternative broadcasting. It's powerful and credible and reaches almost a million people. I don't think any other radio on the left has come as close to reaching as many people with as compelling a message." And that was before September 2001.
Since 9/11, the attacks on Afghanistan and, more recently, in the run-up to and during the invasion of Iraq, with more and more U.S. citizens recognising the need for alternative news sources, the Pacifica experiment has become even more critical and relevant. DN!'s daily "War & Peace Report" was extended by an hour during the hostilities in Iraq and for some time after the war was officially declared over. As the flagship programme of the alternative media, DN! and Amy Goodman have even found themselves featured in what they refer to as the corporate media, including CNN, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post — although she points out that television, in particular, "never let me out during the war!"
In an April 14 interview on CNN after the bomb blasts in Saudi Arabia, she was characteristically forthright in her criticism of the current dispensation in Washington D.C.: "I think there's no question that Bush has increasingly destabilised the world, and what has taken place in Saudi Arabia is a key example." She also used the opportunity to raise an issue that has by and large been neglected by the mainstream media: "Why the Bush administration is preventing the investigation of what happened on September 11... " According to her, "That is a key question to ask...."
In addition she highlighted the kind of information that is regularly featured on DN! but rarely surfaces in mainstream media: "One of the companies that was targeted (in Saudi Arabia) was ... a U.S. executive mercenary group called Vinnell Corporation owned by Northrup-Grumman, formerly owned by President Bush Sr.'s Carlisle Group. This is a mercenary organisation that trains the Saudi Arabian National Guard that is simply there to shore up the undemocratic Saudi regime... the U.S. should be looking at what U.S. corporations are doing, profiting from war and instability."
RITU RAJ KONWAR
Offbeat programmes that are relevant are still out of reach in India.Goodman is unstinting in her public condemnation of the present President, his close advisers and the interests that, in her view, they represent. "I think George Bush is making a very serious miscalculation thinking that he can side with basically those that brought him to power, which is certainly not the majority of people in this country, as we know from the Election 2000. He was selected, he was not elected," she said on the Charlie Rose show on March 12. "I often refer to the Bush administration as the Oiligarchy — look at who we have there: we have George Bush, who was an oil man. You have Dick Cheney, the Vice- President, and former head of the largest oil services corporation in the world. You have Condoleezza Rice — she had a Chevron Oil tanker named after her, the Condoleezza Rice... They represent a force that people are beginning to very clearly understand. And people are saying no to it.... "
"In a `Showdown: Iraq', Blix-is-nixed, pack-my-trench-coat-honey testosterone media age, Amy Goodman and her radio show, `DN!' beam in as if from some alternative left galaxy," declared a profile headlined "Peace Correspondent" in The Washington Post in March.
Goodman is upbeat about the anti-war/peace movement, which she believes will continue to be a force to reckon with, albeit in different forms and rallying around different political and economic issues. "One thing George Bush has succeeded in doing is to unite people around the world against him," she says.
According to her, an untold part of story of the anti-war movement is the level of resistance within the military. "I was just out at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque where thousands were protesting a Bush invasion of Iraq," she told Rose. Those she met there talked about the regular vigil they had kept outside the base and the positive response they had received from passing military men, including one who rolled down his window and said "Hang in there."
Arundhati Roy is clearly a DN! favourite. Since March she has been featured at least three times on the show, most recently on May 28 in conversation with Howard Zinn.
The survivors of the Bhopal gas tragedy and their struggle for justice form the subject of a recurring India-related story: for instance, on May 7, DN! reported that "survivors of the worst industrial accident in world history, which had killed more than 20,000 people," would confront Dow Chemical at its shareholders' meeting the next day.
Both the military face-off between India and Pakistan and the violence in Gujarat last year were covered on DN! And on December 16, 2002 the show featured a story on the elections in Gujarat headlined "India lurches further to the fundamentalist religious right as the Hindu nationalist party winds in a landslide in Gujarat... " Among other Indians interviewed on the programme over the last year were Vandana Shiva ("Is this an Earth Summit or a Trade Summit?") and Arun Gandhi ("Carrying on a legacy of non-violence").
The Israel-Palestine imbroglio is often covered by DN! from a viewpoint not commonly reflected in the U.S. media. On June 26, the lead story began: "Hamas agrees to ceasefire but President Bush derides it and Israel attacks Gaza Strip, killing two Palestinian civilians."
Later the programme aired a major address by Edward Said the previous week in which he had spoken about the most recent Middle East Peace Plan.
On the domestic front, in recent times, the programme and its hosts lived up to their progressive reputation on race. On June 24, the day after the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action through landmark rulings in the high profile cases challenging the weightage given to race in admission decisions at the University of Michigan, DN! was on the steps of the University's student union to hear the reaction to what was being hailed as the most important victory for affirmative action in 25 years.
The programme then went on to host a roundtable discussion with a leading lawyer representing the university in the case against its law school, a vocal and active opponent of affirmative action, as well as a well-known race critic and historian whose view of the Supreme Court backed affirmative action was that it was a means to help the U.S. compete under globalised capitalism rather than to make reparation or to level the playing field.
An outspoken critic of mainstream or corporate media, Goodman was among those who testified at the recent public hearings on the further deregulation of the media, organised by dissenting members of the Federal Communications Commission. The changes favoured by FCC chairman Michael Powell — son of Secretary of State Colin Powell — and endorsed by other Republican members were expected to lead to greater media consolidation, further endangering smaller media outlets as well as the public's right to diverse news sources. Despite the likely impact of the move on the freedom of information and of expression, the debate around it was given relatively scanty coverage in the mainstream media. In contrast, DN! covered many of the hearings live.
And it continued to stay with the story. On June 18, two weeks after the FCC voted 3-2 along party lines to change the rules, the lead story on DN!, headlined, "The People vs. The FCC: The War is not Over", described the attempt by a bi-partisan group of lawmakers to repeal large parts of the controversial decision. The programme also broadcast portions of the first Senate Commerce Committee hearings a day after the ruling during which the FCC chairman was questioned by members.
As Goodman said to Rose in March, "We need the mainstream media to be there in a democratic society to provide a forum for a debate."
In her view, what they did instead — not allowing a real, informed debate around war — was a serious disservice to citizens. "Most people are opposed to war," she said then, "yet the vast majority of guests across the board on the networks are for war."
"At all times, and especially in wartime, truth becomes a lifeline," said Alice Walker and Studs Terkel (quoted in an FSRN brochure). Certainly rare programmes like DN!, FSRN and others on the alternative, but available and accessible, media provide such a lifeline to those who seek it.