Before there was Michael Moore, there was campaigning journalist Amy Goodman … and even if Moore seems to have gone a little quiet, Goodman is still there, doggedly asking questions, an earnest gadfly buzzing around the flinching faces of Trump placemen, challenging and provoking and annoying. With her listener-funded syndicated radio show Democracy Now!, on the air since 1996, Goodman is flying the flag for journalism of the unfashionably homespun progressive left, while America’s corporate news media are sheepishly capitulating to their tech oligarch owners.
This documentary from Carl Deal and Tia Lessin is a portrait of Goodman and her life and times. The title is her somewhat ironic mantra: please, everybody, by all means steal our stories about corruption and demagoguery. Sadly, the big news media are often uninterested (though sometimes they are forced to follow stories broken by Goodman and her team). In fact, the real demand is addressed to their audience: buy this story, please. Democracy Now! accepts no ads or sponsorship, and it relies on money from viewers, listeners and readers of its website, although this documentary is silent on how much it needs annually and how the cash is solicited.
Originally employed on TV’s boisterous Phil Donahue Show, Goodman soon showed she had the chops for investigative journalism on radio; apart from everything else it means persistence. She had a breakthrough with her on-the-spot reports in 1991 on Indonesia’s massacre in East Timor, perpetrated mostly with US-made weapons; she was savagely beaten with M16 rifle-butts, along with the New Yorker’s Allan Nairn – who gallantly threw himself on top of her to spare her the worst of the brutality. Goodman also had a brilliant scoop when she boldly walked into Chevron’s corporate headquarters in Nigeria, flourishing her US passport, demanding an interview, and an unwary press officer for the oil company blandly confirmed that, yes, Chevron was indeed helping the military logistically to crush the protests of the Ogoni people and their spokesperson Ken Saro-Wiwa.
And Democracy Now! had a sensational coup when it persuaded Bill Clinton to call on US election day in November 2000, when he was campaigning for senate hopeful Hillary Clinton and White House candidate Al Gore, and stay on the phone for half an hour. Clinton was nettled at Goodman’s disrespectful questioning, perhaps believing that his charm, to which most of the press had succumbed, would soon cause her to melt. He was clearly intensely irritated that it didn’t. Goodman and Christopher Hitchens were the most prominent anti-Clinton refuseniks on the left, but even Hitchens never got in the president’s face like that.
With 9/11 and the subsequent and discredited “war on terror”, Goodman’s work got even more intense. She fiercely attacked the federal government’s decision to get people quickly back to work at New York’s Ground Zero, despite the health hazards. And of course she denounced the scandalous attack on Iraq for its non-existent weapons of mass destruction. But here, in the spirit of tough questioning, this documentary could have been more critical of Goodman. Not everything is the fault of the US government and its corporate lackeys. The threat of Islamist extremism is one of the biggest stories of the 21st century and Goodman seems less interested. Strange, as the jihadis and their sponsors are utterly opposed to democracy now or at any other time.
Trump is another difficult one for Goodman, in a way, perhaps because he is so brazen, and also because he attacks the mainstream media – which echoes Goodman’s own rhetoric. Just for a moment in this documentary, as Trump is encouraging his base to get violent with reporters, you might think that Goodman could have maybe sided with her mainstream comrades more. But she is clear enough about Trump’s reliance on complaisant big media. And Goodman’s work goes on in the era of Ukraine and Gaza, and it looks like harder, lonelier work than ever.
