Amy Goodman’s Relentless Pursuit of Power, Accountability And Truth
One of America’s greatest and fearless investigative journalists, Amy Goodman’s career is profiled in the new documentary, “Steal this Story, Please.”
The film opens with Goodman chasing after President Donald Trump’s climate policy adviser, Preston Wells Griffith, at the U.N. Climate Summit in Poland, asking him what he thought about the president’s comment that climate change is a Chinese hoax. He runs away, refusing to answer. Goodman proceeds in hot pursuit of him until Preston finds refuge behind a locked U.S. delegation door.
This incident exemplifies who Goodman is and what she’s willing to do to flesh out a story, never backing down and demanding answers to tough questions.
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It was working on her older brother David’s family newspaper that whetted her appetite for news, as well as being a diehard fan of the old Phil Donahue talk show. She worked for WBAI, the independent media Pacifica Radio station in New York City, for 10 years. She then co-founded the progressive news program Democracy Now in 1996, hosting and producing it.
The program attempts to give voice to those people and story angles ignored by mainstream corporate media, as well as speak truth to power. It takes no advertising, corporate or governmental funding. It streams on YouTube, where it has 3.3 million subscribers.
As she says several times throughout the film, she wants the stories she covers to be picked up as much as possible by other media outlets, including mainstream purveyors, hence the documentary’s title.
Rather than a traditional biographical approach, the film centers on her work, focusing on some of the major news stories of her career: the peaceful rally for independence in East Timor by the Indonesian army that turned into a massacre, in which she and another reporter were beaten; the overturning of the death sentence and release of the innocent imprisoned Louisiana Black man, Moreese Bickham; her famous interview with President Bill Clinton on the night of the 2000 election when she criticized him for passing NAFTA and shifting the Democratic Party to the right; exposing the truth about Chevron’s activities in Nigeria and the ongoing war in Gaza, among others.
Mentioned throughout the film is the influence of Judaism on Goodman’s values and career. Religion Unplugged interviewed Goodman over Zoom recently about her Jewish upbringing and a host of other topics tied to relgion.
“I grew up in a family where Judaism was extremely important,” she recalled. “The background of the Holocaust informed our lives. It wasn’t that far away, as I was close to all my grandparents. All four of them had fled pogroms.”
She continued: “My mother’s father was an Orthodox rabbi, who ran the Crown Heights yeshiva in Brooklyn. My father’s grandfather was a Hassidic rabbi at the Henry Street synagogue in the lower East side. When he died, they closed the Brooklyn Bridge, and there was a procession of thousands. On my father’s side, our ancestry goes back to my great great great grandfather who was Bal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. My mother went to religious school but also attended a public high school and later both Hebrew College and Hunter College. When my parents had me and my brother, they decided not to raise us as Orthodox or even Conservative, but live culturally, though we had Friday Shabbat dinners and prayers.”
Their kitchen table, she recalled, was the site of debate and discussion concerning the significant issues of the day.
“My friends invited for dinner would say, ‘You don’t just eat, but argue and debate.’ That was the way we had conversations about the big issues of the day,” she added. “It came from my Jewish education. You ask questions and you take nothing for granted. And the way that you deal with the world is through intense curiosity and not being afraid to stand by your principles. Our lives were committed to making sure the Holocaust never happened again. My grandmother was born in Rivne, now in Ukraine, the site of a Holocaust massacre. It was the background of our lives, which were mostly secular as the grandchildren of immigrants.”
Goodman also recalled going to shul in Brooklyn with her Orthodox rabbi grandfather.
“He would tell me to go upstairs with the other women. I would say why can’t I pray next to you?” she said. “He replied, ‘Because the men are filled with prayer and are observant, while the women gossip.” Then I would go with the women, and they couldn’t be more religious, while the men would be slapping each other behind their backs. But there was much humor which helped us get through hard times and our differences.”
Asked how her Jewish background influenced her decision to become a journalist, Goodman replied, “It’s my Jewish upbringing by people who came to this country seeking asylum, to be safe, that has informed me. That’s why today’s crackdown of immigrants is extremely alarming because most of us wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the country allowing us in. It’s a melting pot of many different culture and religions, which makes this country great, so this crackdown is extremely threatening to the fabric of our society.”
Goodman said that going to Hebrew school and learning why people would risk their lives to help the Jewish people during the Holocaust was a key motivating factor in her career choice.
“Hiding families in barns, attics or basements by helping children who had lost their parents, your life was threatened if exposed,” she said. “They were called the righteous. I was so impressed by their stories, which deserved to be told. What saves us is community, and that is why community independent media is so important. It’s brought to us by people who care most about learning about people who care most about war and peace, global warming, LGBTQ issues, the immigrant crackdown, racial and economic justice, reproductive rights.”
Goodman said she has issues with the way the mainstream media — what she calls “corporate” — because she doesn’t consider them mainstream any more.
“We hear on all the networks a small circle of pundits who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong,” she said. “I believe in providing a platform for people to speak for themselves. I learned that from hearing my family’s stories, some of which were religious but others not, but we built our own community, which is how we protect each other.”
Goodman said that when she worked at Pacifica Radio, people were allowed to speak for themselves.
“We challenged the stereotypes and caricatures that fuel these hate groups. You might hear an uncle in Iran who sounds like my uncle whom I love, making it much less likely you will want to destroy that person,” she said. “The media can be the greatest force for peace on earth. Instead, it is yielded as a weapon of war, which is why we must take it back. My colleague in the film talks about the media being a frame and people being erased from inside that frame. We take the voices from outside and bring them into the frame, but also center them.”
Goodman said the job of a journalist is to “go where the silence is and it’s often not silent, but raucous and rowdy, and people are organizing. It just doesn’t hit the corporate radar screen, but that’s where Democracy Now lives.”
Throughout her career, Goodman said she faced a great deal of rejection and people refusing to answer her often blunt questions.
“I suppose Judaism gave me fortitude to persevere through rejection, but it might also be doggedness,” she said. “I have a dog named Zasu, after the youth in occupied France in World War II who fought against the Nazis. It’s about challenging those in power, with the media serving as a great equalizing force. That is why freedom of the press is enshrined in the Constitution in the First Amendment. It’s essential to the functioning of a democratic society, and the flip side of that is the public’s right to know. You can’t be a meaningful democracy without people being informed. President Trump calls the media, ‘the enemy of the people’. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Goodman said she currently attends synagogue. At the same time, her reporting at Democracy Now has been critical of Israel, accusing the government of genocide in regards to the bombing of Palestinians in Gaza.
“My coverage of Israel and Palestine is informed by my sense of fairness and justice when we see the horror that has taken place in Palestine. It is critical to listen to all voices,” she said. “The media corporate networks almost never bring the voices of Palestinians. Our job is to go where all the silence is. We’ve interviewed so many Palestinian journalists, doctors, because of the catastrophe that is happening to them. But we’ve also interviewed Israeli peacemakers opposed to the violence in Gaza.”
Brian Bromberger is a freelance writer/journalist who works as a staff reporter and arts critic for The Bay Area Reporter weekly newspaper in San Francisco.