The unlikely news source Voice of America (6/15/09) has Adam Phillips’ profile of Amy Goodman and “the largest public media collaboration in the United States,” Democracy Now!, in which Goodman lays out “her job as a journalist” as “to bring out ‘the voices of people closest to the story at the grassroots'”:
In Goodman’s program, as well as in her column and the three bestselling books she has co-authored with her brother, David Goodman, she also accuses the mainstream media of dangerous laziness in its reliance on so-called “pundits.”
“We need to bring out the voices of people who think outside the box, [and include] creative thinkers, [and] people at the grassroots, who know exactly what they’re talking about, because they’ve experienced policy in a very real way,” she says. “These are the stories we have to tell until they can tell their own.”
The great disparity between complicit corporate reportage and Democracy Now!‘s invaluable muckraking is boiled down to one crucial observation: “The media’s job is ‘to serve democratic society,’ she adds ‘not to win a popularity contest.'” Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: “Amy Goodman on The Exception to the Rulers” (5/21/04).
Those are nice words – but not always adhered to, sad to say.
That said, I read the transcripts for DN! every damn day, and it is indispensible to me, and many others.
But, as with you guys, there’s too much thinking inside the box (albeit a larger box than the corpress), and too little attention paid to contradicting many of what I’d deem self-evident contradictions.
Goodman et al, and you, can, and have to, do better. The world, and the idiots that inhabit it – like you and me – depend on it.
Goodman and her weekday show are spectacular! Day after day, unceasingly, tirelesslydiggoing out an telling what others don;t bother about. How can anyone expect more from her and her program? – with very limited funds ( vs the main & lame streams for sure!) she, nearly alone, is pushing back against the lazy ‘PR safe” headline media reportage that has become the norm on the liberal side vs. the totally unabashedly biased, agenda-driven rabid far-right side that is first and foremost propoganda. The fact the latter is so powerfully winning speaks to its own cause – if not “case.” But journalism, as I grew up with it, the clear casuality of public discourse today, has been dead and buried now for many years. Persuasion and “branding” is what is taught now in former journalism curricula-” communication” is the name of this department/school/curriculum at many universities, not “journalism.” What a difference. What a woeful sign of the times!