“She is a French anti-fascist freedom-fighting biting Zuchon,” Goodman explains. She lives in Manhattan with her puppy, Zazou, named after France’s World War II-era anti-Nazi youth culture. Goodman’s on-screen persona can appear intimidating, but off air, she is all warmth and idealism. It’s not about getting rich, it’s not about her Twitter following,” Isay continues (Goodman doesn’t have a Twitter account). “She’s not interested in being a celebrity. “The average age in her audience is probably 21.” “It’s funny because she’s so popular with young people, but she’s like the epitome of an old-school journalist,” says David Isay, founder of the oral history nonprofit Stor圜orps, who got his start working with Goodman.
Millions of viewers tune into the show from 1,500 TV and radio stations around the world, as well as on YouTube and Democracy Now’s website, which had 46.3 million visits last year. Goodman’s rejection of corporate advertising and neutral, “both-sides” journalism, and her disinterest in personality-driven media, have-somewhat ironically-won her a loyal following. “And then they take those stories and make them into national stories.” The show has often been called a progressive news program, but Goodman shies away from ideological labels, preferring to call it “corporate-free” and “people-sponsored.” “Hearing people speak for themselves,” she says, “there’s just nothing more powerful.” Her journalistic precept, which she champions at every interview and public speech, is “to go to where the silence is.” “There are a lot of people who work in the mainstream media who are listening and watching Democracy Now!,” says journalist Maria Hinojosa, who hosts the radio program Latino USA. In 2016, she reported from the Dakota Access oil pipeline protests in North Dakota, helping put them on the national agenda. Goodman covering the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at the Standing Brook Sioux Reservation, in North Dakotaĭemocracy Now’s growth has been fueled by her instinct for under-covered stories of national importance. Anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.” Goodman’s vision has remained the same: “I see the media as a huge kitchen table that stretches across the globe, that we all sit around and debate and discuss the most important issues of the day,” she says.
But Democracy Now!, a scrappy, donor-supported media organization that Goodman has led for 25 years, continues to feel current-even with its dated graphic design and retro funk-rock theme music, unchanged since the nineties.
In 2021, the idea of a live daily news show might seem old-fashioned. “It’s that kind of dialogue that will save the world,” she insists. Not in my brother’s name.’” The interview was one of the most memorable-and prophetic-moments in Democracy Now’s history, and it reflects what Goodman sees as media’s highest purpose. “Rita Lasar realized at that moment her brother would be used to justify an attack on Afghanistan,” Goodman recalls. Bush invoked her brother’s heroism-he had stayed in the World Trade Center to help his quadriplegic friend-in a speech given after the attacks. bombing, and Rita Lasar, an anti-war activist who lost her brother in the 9/11 attacks. In January 2002, the show hosted a dialogue between Masuda Sultan, an Afghan-American woman whose family members had recently been killed by U.S. Amy Goodman ’84, host of the independent TV and radio news hour Democracy Now!, was one of the earliest journalists to focus on the human toll of the war. But in the wake of 9/11, critics of the invasion, when they were heard at all, were regarded as naïve, even un-American. war in Afghanistan looks tragically ill-conceived.
With 20 years of hindsight, to many the U.S.