Pacifica listeners, the most politically pumped-up demographic in Radioland, are taking to the e-mails again. This time they’re galvanized by what they see as a move to oust Amy Goodman, for many years co-host and heart and soul of Democracy Now!, a popular news program that showcases the network’s avowedly radical take on the world.
The facts are: Goodman was ordered to institute certain changes in the program’s operating procedures, to which she objected as unduly burdensome. There were other demands as well relating to more control over her public speaking engagements. If she did not comply, management threatened “disciplinary actions up to and including termination.” Goodman struck back by filing a list of grievances through her union, AFTRA, charging various forms of harassment.
Many listeners feel that management’s move against Goodman, ostensibly to “professionalize” the operation, is really an attempt to bland down the show. Our main concern is that Democracy Now! be preserved under Goodman and her current co-host, Juan Gonzalez. The program has broadcast a string of scoops and garnered some of radio’s highest awards. It features the kind of hard-nosed investigative reporting that only noncommercial radio can do. Its series on the Chevron Oil company’s collaboration with the murderous Nigerian dictatorship won a George Polk Award (see Goodman and Scahill, “Drilling and Killing,” November 16, 1998, and “Killing for Oil in Nigeria,” March 15, 1999). Goodman’s reports from East Timor with Allan Nairn resulted in a documentary that collected numerous awards. Democracy Now! has covered a host of other stories that the mainstream media ignored or on-the-other-handed to death. Its reports on the Republican and Democratic conventions focused on the corporate domination of these political trade fairs, still another example of what alternative radio can do that the commercial networks won’t.
Even the often admirable National Public Radio has sunk to the practice of corporate underwriting; it recently (and disgracefully) joined the big-bucks broadcast lobby in opposing low-power community radio. Pacifica is one of the few noncommercial radio voices left–“the last bastion of the precept, enshrined in the FCC Act, that the public airways are a public trust,” as we said in a previous editorial. Goodman and Democracy Now! belong on Pacifica. Make that with an exclamation point!
