Tenaciousness and hope on FM: Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!

Originally published in Current, Nov. 17, 1997

By Jacqueline Conciatore

It's March 3, 1995, and an intense young woman reporter is confronting Newt Gingrich during one of his daily round-table briefings before the media.

Positioned next to C-SPAN's camera so the Speaker can't easily ignore her, the reporter asks about the new Congress's "war on women."

"You fired the first salvo when you called the First Lady a bitch," she says. "So why don't you apologize?" He chastises her for the question. She asks again. He says something like: "To the best of my knowledge, I never said what you said I said." She says: "Are you calling your mother a liar, then?"

The reporter was Amy Goodman, surely one of the most confrontational out there. The exchange, which took place during the Speaker's glory days, so surprised the newspeople present that they reported it under headlines like, "Gingrich can't ditch bitch remark." Sam Donaldson even phoned to offer his congratulations, Goodman says.

"That attitude of yelling from the back of the room and persisting until you get an answer," says media activist Jeff Cohen, "sort of like what Sam Donaldson gets credit for, but really isn't. Amy Goodman's the real thing." Cohen and others last month named Goodman a "media hero," during the Media and Democracy Congress in New York.

A spirit of confrontation and irreverence for powerful people drives the daily show Goodman hosts for Pacifica Radio, Democracy Now! Now ending its second year--it started as an election year show in '96--Democracy Now! is on about 24 stations, most of them small and community-licensed. Originating from WBAI, New York, the one-hour show has a skeleton staff. Goodman and producer Daniel Coughlin do the day-to-day work. (Coughlin is known for his breaking coverage of U.S. detention camps holding Haitian refugees with HIV status.) New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez co-hosts two days per week, an engineer comes in for the one-hour broadcast, and Executive Producer Julie Drizin oversees the program and several others from Washington, D.C.

If you're talking ratings, program carriage and mainstream reputation, Democracy Now! clearly operates on the margins. Any show with a slogan like "The Exception to the Rulers," and an attitude to match will drive away some listeners. Others who might enjoy the show wouldn't think of tuning to the little, left-oriented stations that carry it. In terms of carriage and reputation--suffice it to say that the "Pacifica" name has baggage.

But there are journalists, including mainstream ones, who listen and praise. Democracy Now! often covers -- and stays on -- stories most media outlets ignore. Plus, many admire Goodman's fearless, unrelenting pursuit of stories. She is best known for her reporting on Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, where she nearly lost her life. The resulting radio program, "Massacre: The Story of East Timor," won 11 awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize and an Alfred I. DuPont/Columbia Silver Baton.

"How to get to tone?"

Judging from her recent recollections about the Gingrich incident, Goodman isn't into confrontation for its own sake, at least not primarily. She says that, just prior to the event, she'd spent days mentally processing congressional goings-on: proposed legislation that would cut into abortion rights even in cases of rape and incest; bills that would cut welfare benefits for mothers and children; and the many sex-harassment accusations against Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.), which she felt his colleagues were ignoring. Days earlier, she'd observed a late-night lawmaking session in which a group of male representatives segued from policy about illegitimacy rates to a jokey discussion about why women have sex. And then there was the "Barney-fag" comment by Gingrich lieutenant Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.). "I felt a snicker went around the country, that these words were OK," she says. "I wasn't raised calling women 'bitches.' This is the Speaker of the House. He speaks. What he says matters.

"How do you get at the issue of tone?," she says. "How do you express that, and how do you have the Speaker address it?"

Gingrich eventually canceled his daily briefings, saying he didn't want to give a forum to reporters like Goodman. Goodman believes he canceled them because the Oklahoma City bombing made it politically unwise for him to continue pronouncements in his typical anti-government tone.

The Woody/Mia approach

Democracy Now! aims to bring to the air voices not usually heard, to "have grassroots activists speaking to power," says Goodman. A recent guest, for example, was one of the environmental protesters whom Humboldt County (Calif.) sheriff's deputies tried to control with pepper spray. According to the Associated Press, the officers tipped back the young women's heads, forced their eyes open, and applied the burning substance with swabs. Guidelines say pepper spray should be discharged from at least two feet back. Democracy Now!'s treatment of the story was part of a regular "drumbeat" on issues of police brutality, says Drizin.

This tenacious treatment of stories Goodman calls the "Woody/Mia approach," a reference to mainstream journalists' equally persistent pursuit of celebrity gossip. "They take a story like [Woody Allen and Mia Farrow's] divorce and every day they pound away, they tell the same story, the nut of the story, over and over every day for, say, five days, each day adding one element like, 'Mia walked outside today.' ... And so we take that same approach with stories we consider are significant and see how they develop."

Goodman's home station WBAI took that approach to a story brought to its attention by independent producer David Isay.

In 1958, Moreese Bickham had been sentenced to death for shooting two police officers in Mandeville, La. Through all his years in prison, Bickham claimed the officers were Klansmen who ambushed him on his front porch. Despite a reportedly clean prison record--Bickham was even ordained as a Methodist minister while in prison--Louisiana governors continually denied him clemency. Convinced Bickham's self-defense story was true, Isay asked an attorney friend to push for Bickham's release. He also brought the story to Goodman, who brought it to the air, along with Bickham (via telephone) and his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

After that, "every day, we said [to listeners], 'How do you feel about this? He can be considered for clemency by the governor.' And every day we gave out the governor's office number." When the office changed its number, Goodman gave out the new one. "She kept on top of this story all the way through," says Isay. "She's unstoppable. She went on and on and stayed on it and stayed on it."

Despite this activism, Bickham's lawyer said the Mandeville police community still felt aggrieved by Bickham, and predicted that the old and ailing man would die in prison.

But eventually Gov. Edwin Edwards made Bickham eligible for parole. According to Goodman and Isay, when Nightline's Ted Koppel asked a governor's spokesperson what caused the change, the man said something like, "There was this little radio station in New York ... "

Now about 80 years old, Bickham lives in California with his family.

Goodman was frustrated that reporters covering Bickham's release played it as the governor's change of heart. "I just think it's very important to be accurate," she says. "I think we have to talk about, when it exists, the grassroots mechanism that leads to social change, that it's not just people in power changing their minds, which is so often the view of the corporate media, which ... just talks to people on top. But how did this come down? And how do people organize? I have tremendous respect for grassroots activists and the time they devote and what a difference that makes in communities."

Goodman meets with activists in cities wherever she travels, in part to help feed Democracy Now!'s story pipeline.

The Harvard-educated, 40-year-old Goodman also travels around speaking about East Timor, which she has covered on location in 1990, 1991, and 1994. Currently, she and colleague Allan Nairn are officially banned from the small country.

They and a British videojournalist brought to the West evidence of government soldiers' massacre of Timorese civilians in 1991. The Brit was able to smuggle footage of soldiers gunning down peasant women and school children--tape he shot, buried and then smuggled out of the country. Soldiers had taken Goodman and Nairn's tape and photographs, but the two brought back photos of themselves, bloodied, as evidence of what happened.

They had walked at the front of a village protest procession prior to the assault, Goodman holding high her mike and Nairn his small camera, thinking their presence could head off violence. But soldiers fired into the crowd anyway. They also beat the two reporters with their rifle butts, fracturing Nairn's skull. Although at one point soldiers lined up and aimed their guns at the two, they eased up as Goodman and Nairn repeatedly shouted, "We're from America!" Goodman believes they didn't shoot because their guns come from the U.S.

The two reporters returned to Indonesia in 1994, where they were briefly detained by police after they sneaked into East Timor. Later, as they held a press conference, police tried to drag them away, but the world's press was present, and reporters literally hung on to their two colleagues, Goodman says.

Today, Democracy Now! follows every event in the small Southeast Asian country, and airs Massacre on the event's anniversary. "U.S. journalists are intimately connected to East Timor, unfortunately by a U.S. M-16, and it's our responsibility to cover that, photograph that, report that," Goodman says. "It's probably the most frightening place on earth."

Les Payne, assistant managing editor of Newsday, credits Goodman and Democracy Now! for throwing light on stories of which most people are completely unaware. "She awakened me" to the East Timor story, he says. "It's another example of Amy Goodman being very persistent, focused and intense about a part of the world that is overlooked."

A disappointment

Democracy Now! would seem a natural for the system's 100 or so community stations, but only 18 carry the show besides the five Pacifica stations. The program lost about a third of its carriage earlier this year, when Philadelphia station WRTI and its repeater stations dropped the program as it was about to air commentaries by death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. He was convicted of killing Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner.

"It's the only thing we're disappointed about--that more stations aren't taking the show," says Executive Producer Drizin. "The public radio system has largely been Pacifica-resistant, and community radio stations, who are the most likely to take Pacifica programming, are very committed to maintaining a local identity." Another barrier is that many community stations have long, complicated program-acquisition processes, requiring input from staff, volunteers and listeners.

One of the non-customers is WORT, Madison, one of the best-known community stations. "We all feel very strongly about how good a program it is," says Operations Coordinator Norm Stockwell. "But our commitment by mission statement is to provide as much local access as we can, to provide our community with a window to the airwaves." An hour a day is a lot to give up when the station is already struggling to find room for new local shows, he says. Stockwell manages to listen to the show via satellite, however.

Carriage for Democracy Now! may increase now that the show is being distributed over Pacifica's new Ku-band satellite system, a cheaper alternative to the NPR-operated C-band satellite.

Although all five Pacifica stations--in New York, L.A., Houston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco--help pay for Democracy Now!, they are variously critical and supportive of it, sources say. There have been complaints of an East Coast bias, feelings that the show shouldn't be produced in New York, concerns about a "knee-jerk" distrust of everyone in power. Some are concerned about the show being personality-driven--anathema to the serious-minded, issue-oriented broadcasters.

Of course there are internal differences pertaining to the show, says Drizin; Pacifica has no unanimity on anything. But there is a consensus that it has to be cutting-edge, and the network is generally supportive, she says.

Network President Pat Scott says Democracy Now! has a high level of audience appreciation and "delightful" prospects for the future. "It represents where we want to go," she says. "It's our first attempt to put our resources together and produce a public affairs program we consider a signature program."

Democracy Now! is getting less money from its network this year than it did originally. Initially, it got the bulk of $200,000 that the Pacifica Foundation and the five stations pooled to start new programs; now it's getting about $120,000--half its budget. The show will seek to make up the other half from foundation grants. Scott says Democracy Now! is best able to bring in its own funding, while start-ups like call-in program Living Room with Larry Bensky need bigger infusions.

Lack of money is "the biggest challenge we face," says Drizin. "[The show's success] comes down to tiny handful of workaholics who are committed to making the program happen."

The staff is not shy about promoting the program, regularly putting out releases to announce when they've broken a story, for example. The producers discovered that Haitian terrorist leader Emmanuel Constant was living in New York, according to one release. Another boasted that the show had the first nationally broadcast interview with Congo rebel leader Laurent Kabila as he took Kinshasa.

Listeners appreciate it all, and have made the program one of Pacifica's most successful in terms of fundraising. One notable fact is that even the far-left contingent of folks who are furiously critical of Scott's management of Pacifica have good things to say about Democracy Now!. "It is, among those critics of Pacifica, considered to be the exception to Pacifica rulers," says Jeffrey Blankfort of Take Back KPFA!

The Pacifica foes would surely raise a ruckus if the program were to die an unnatural death, which seems appropriate for a program dedicated to activism.

There is a hunger for Democracy Now! because it broadens the spectrum of debate, says Goodman. Most importantly, she says, is that the program is ultimately about hope. "The greatest threat to democracy is apathy, and Democracy Now! is about people who are taking action, people who believe in democracy [and their] constructive efforts."

 

	.	To Current's home page
	.	Later news: Though she tried to avoid it, Goodman became embroiled in Pacifica's internal troubles in 2000.

 

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