Amy Goodman is the co-founder, executive
producer and host of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent,
award-winning news program airing on more than 450 public broadcast
stations in North America.
Goodman graduated from Harvard with a degree in anthropology in 1984.
She began her career in community radio in 1985 at Pacifica Radio's New
York station, WBAI, where she produced WBAI's Evening News for 10
years.
In 1991, Goodman traveled to East Timor to report on the Indonesian
occupation of East Timor. There, she and colleague Allan Nairn
witnessed Indonesian soldiers gun down 270 East Timorese men, women and
children during a memorial procession. Indonesian soldiers savagely
beat Goodman and Nairn, fracturing Nairn's skull. Their documentary,
"Massacre: The Story of East Timor" won numerous awards, including the
Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Alfred I.
DuPont-Columbia Award, the Armstrong Award, the Radio/Television News
Directors Award, as well as awards from the Associated Press, United
Press International and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In 1996, Goodman helped launch Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!.
Two years later, Goodman and producer Jeremy Scahill went to Nigeria.
Their award-winning radio documentary "Drilling and Killing: Chevron
and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship" exposed Chevron's role in the killing
of two Nigerian villagers in the Niger Delta, who were protesting yet
another oil spill in their community. In 1999, Goodman traveled to Peru
to interview American political prisoner Lori Berenson. It was the
first time a journalist had ever gotten into the prison to speak to
her.
In March 2004, Goodman obtained the
international broadcast exclusive of the return of Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide from his imposed exile in the Central African
Republic to Jamaica, accompanying the Aristides with the delegation
that retrieved them. Her coverage of the Haitian story scored more than
3.5 million hits on Democracy Now!'s Web site, ultimately forcing the story into the mainstream press in what Goodman describes as "trickle up" journalism.
In addition to writing her syndicated editorial column, Goodman is co-author, with her brother David Goodman, of the book Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People Who Fight Back (Hyperion, 2006). The pair also co-wrote the national best-seller The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them.
The book was chosen by independent bookstores as the No. 1 political
title of the 2004 election season and ranked as one of the top 50
nonfiction books of 2004 by the editors of Publishers Weekly.
Truthdig - article: "Organizer in Chief"
Democracy Now!
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