GNN
The Exception to the Rulers New!
Fri Jun 25, 2004 17:08
64.140.158.4

The Exception to the Rulers New!
The voice of the silenced majority

http://www.guerrillanews.com/war_on_terrorism/doc4587.html

On a 70 city tour, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman has never been hotter. With her new book, “The Exception to the Rulers,” (co-authored with her brother David) selling off the racks, Goodman has solidified herself as the leading voice of the so-called alternative media. GNN talks with Goodman about the Fox Effect, NBC’s missileman, and the dangerous irrationality of power.

GNN: Tell us how you got into progressive media, was there an issue or a watershed moment?

Amy Goodman: A couple of years ago, before 9/11, we were broadcasting on several dozen community Pacifica radio stations and affiliates. Now, two years later, we are on more than 170 community radio stations, Pacifica stations, NPR stations, we are on stations across Canada and Australia, we are on public access TV stations around the country, as well as broadcasting on Dish network FSTV, channel 9415, the oldest non-profit progressive TV channel in the country, and we video and audio stream at Democracynow.org. Now all of that is to say that we are bringing together public media in this country because if we don’t work together, we are gong to go down alone. We have to shore up the public spaces in this country, in this rapidly privatizing world. We need to make our own media, to work with people around the country on local issues and on global issues. That’s what media in a democratic society is all about.

GNN: Is there a worldview that mainstream reporters hold that you think in some way separates them from what you’re doing and what other people are doing in progressive media?

Goodman: I think the mainstream media is a misnomer, because the mainstream media doesn’t represent the mainstream. The mainstream media represents a tiny minority elite, and I am not talking about people of color. I am talking about government officials, corporate executives, generals and their underlings, who beat the drums for war and beat the drums for the establishment. That does not reflect America. And what we need is to break the sound barrier, making our own media but also challenging them. We are not the only ones using the public airwaves. They are using them too, and they have a responsibility to present the full diversity of voices in this country.

The Pentagon has the most powerful weapons on Earth but there is something more powerful that they have deployed and that is the weapon of the media. We are not supposed to be servicing them. That does a disservice to the service men and women of this country. We are supposed to be holding those in power accountable. We are supposed to be the exception to the rulers. That’s what makes a society healthy, to have an independent media, and that’s what we aim to do in this country.

GNN: Those reporters on Fox and MSNBC, they imagine themselves to be journalists - people who are involved in the search for truth. Do you think there is a psychology that precludes them from understanding that there are viewpoints they don’t represent, or do you think they are actually just cynical people who are just representing that minority belief?

Goodman: The people in the media are by and large very isolated. They are living in their own world, which is a revolving door between those in government, those in business and those in television. You look at what happened after 9/11 when the media personalities – you can’t call them journalists – kept intoning the figure 90% - 90% of Americans were for war. I never believed it for a second. Because if you ask people, do you believe the killing of innocent civilians should be avenged by the killing of innocent civilians, more than 90% of Americans would have said no. And we have to demand of people in the media to reflect what’s going on in this country. We see ourselves in this country through a corporate lens. We are reflected and refracted through the media. If you don’t know someone personally, that’s how we come to know other communities in this country, and it’s also the way the rest of the world sees us, and seeing us through that corporate militaristic lens is very dangerous. And it’s not true. It’s inaccurate. It is spreading lies and lies take lives.

GNN: We have seen something called the Fox Effect where other networks were driven to the right due to Fox’s success. Some say that Amy Goodman has the same power as Fox News, and is also an advocate of a certain perspective, and she is not objective either. Do you believe there is any objectivity in journalism or do you believe that everyone has a point of view and it’s just a question of being honest about it?

Goodman: I think we all have a point of view and we just have to be honest about it. As journalists we have to be fair and accurate and we do have to provide a forum for all voices. And that’s what the corporate media refuses to do. And it’s not just Fox. It is NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and all the others, although there are not that may others in the sense of who owns the media. It’s a very few. The first night of the bombing of Baghdad, Dan Rather said, ‘Good morning Baghdad.’ Tom Brokaw said we have to be careful about destroying the infrastructure of Iraq, because we are going to own that country in a few days. We have got to look at who owns the media, and during the Persian Gulf War, CBS was owned by Westinghouse. NBC was owned by General Electric. These are two of the major nuclear weapons manufacturers in the world and they made most of the parts for most of the weapons in the Persian Gulf War. I don’t think it was an accident that what we watched was a military hardware show. Then after the Persian Gulf War, one of the men who was the chief architect of the press censorship rules during the Persian Gulf War, Pete Williams, the Pentagon spokesperson, became one of the chief correspondents for NBC, owned by GE, one of the major nuclear weapons manufacturers of the world.

Now if we turned this around and described to someone what the Iraqi media was like – that one of the chief networks was owned by one of the major Iraqi weapons manufacturers, and one of their chief correspondents was the former military spokesperson, we would all laugh and nod our heads and say what do you expect? This is a military dictatorship.

GNN: America accused Iraq of being a purveyor of WMDs. Is it ironic that America itself is guilty of being of a chief purveyor?

Goodman: In October of 2002, three women - three nuns went to a nuclear weapons site in Colorado – Ardeth Platte, Jackie Hudson and Carol Gilbert - and they started to hammer on nuclear warheads to protest war. They were wearing jumpsuits that said CWIT – Citizens Weapons Inspection Team – and they were exposing the weapons of mass destruction in this country that destabilized the world. They are all in prison now. They are women that were not afraid of what would happen to them, but were afraid for the future of all of us. The question of WMDs being used responsibly is a very important one because simply the act of having WMDs is destabilizing in the world, because it scares people.

Noam Chomsky said a superpower exerts its power not by acting rationally but by acting irrationally. You never know where they will strike next and that is what’s so scary. We saw what happened at the dawn of the nuclear age, with scientists, many of whom were pacifists, many of whom were deeply concerned about the weapon that they were building, who were told nuclear weapons would be used as a deterrent. Once it was developed, they were used - to the horror of many of them. They thought it would be used against Germany because Germany was developing nuclear weapons. I think the lesson of that is when you have it, you use it, and that’s what so frightens so many people, and people have different responses when they are scared, when they feel insecure. And that’s what scares me.

GNN: What about DU - depleted uranium?

Goodman: Depleted uranium is an extremely serious issue, wherever it is used. It was used in the bombing of Yugoslavia, it was used in the first Persian Gulf War, it was used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It is the bomb that just keeps bombing, that just keeps destroying people’s lives. It is both the Iraqis that it affects, and the U.S. soldiers, because they are in these depleted uranium-encrusted tanks, and are the ones that are shooting off these depleted uranium weapons. We don’t know exactly why, during the Persian Gulf War, so many soldiers got sick. It is not clear what causes Gulf War Syndrome, but it looks like it’s caused by a myriad of sources - perhaps from the oil fires, perhaps from exposure to DU, or all of these things together. But what is clear is that DU is not healthy for humans and other living things, and once it is dropped, once it pervades an area, it endangers everyone.

GNN: Why isn’t it mentioned in the media?

Goodman: Maybe one of the reasons depleted uranium is not mentioned very much by the Pentagon, or its effects are denied, and because the media very much follows the line of the Pentagon - they rarely raise it - is because it is also so dangerous for U.S. soldiers because it affects their own.

GNN: One of the metaphors that is used is that of a dysfunctional family, where the father is abusing one of the kids but no one talks about it. Is that an apt metaphor for our society?

Goodman: Whenever questions are raised about, for example, the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration tries to say that it is disrespecting the soldiers and that they are about protecting soldiers. It’s a complete fraud. These soldiers are not protected. We just interviewed a woman who has the dubious distinction of becoming the first homeless veteran of the invasion of Iraq. She went into a coma in Iraq, she came out, was in two hospitals, sent back the United States in Boston, goes to a veteran’s hospital, they say they have no place for her and that she has to go to the emergency room of the local hospital, that if she wants to get her things that were at an airbase in Germany, she would have to buy a ticket herself to go back and pay the moving costs.

Soldiers who lay dying in hospitals had to pay eight dollars for food a day, until recently, when that was exposed. If they couldn’t pay it, they wouldn’t eat. And then you have the whole issue of servicemen and women in Afghanistan losing their extra combat pay. You have soldiers in Iraq now who are very scared, who are asking very serious questions about what they are doing there. Even in the mainstream networks, there are calls for Rumsfeld to resign. There is a revolt going on in the military in this country, as there is in the intelligence community – because they too feel like they have been used, that the intelligence has been abused, misrepresented, lied about. I think Bush is uniting people across the political spectrum, across continents, against him.

GNN: It’s almost like the American people have such a short-term memory that they cannot connect the dots. How do the people in the administration view the American public?

Goodman: I.F. Stone, the great journalist, said many years ago, governments lie. And that’s what they do. And in a time of war, we can see this ever more clearly, and the media should be there not as cheerleaders for war, but dissecting everything the government says. The American people can’t do something about that which they know nothing about. And so when information is kept from them, they can’t make informed decisions. We can’t make informed decisions. It’s why, on the eve of the war, the Pentagon put out this memo that said they would not allow the body bags of soldiers, when soldiers come home in caskets, to be videotaped or photographed at Dover Airbase in Delaware, Ramstein in Germany, because they understand that the American public does not like to see their sons and daughters dying on the battlefield. It’s a big lie - just the omission of those pictures - and it has to be challenged. Because that is what war is. War is hell. It is gore, it’s the loss of life, and it’s unacceptable.

GNN: What do we have to focus on and do to bring us to the next level democratically in this country?

Goodman: I think all the different grassroots movements in this country have to mobilize into a pro-democracy movement. We are quick to call groups in other countries pro-democracy movements, but not here at home. We need democracy here like people need it all over the world, and right now is a very important moment. It’s a defining moment in history. I think what’s critical is people become active on many different issues, because it is people being activated that I think will save this country. It’s apathy, or more importantly, people feeling like they can’t make a difference and the media defining it as apathy - that is the greatest threat.

Mainstream media doesn’t interview heads of civic organizations. They interview government representatives, CEOs and military representatives. Most of the people in this country aren’t any of those and they don’t see themselves reflected. They don’t see a place for themselves. That’s why the independent media movement is so important in this country. And I see this year, the independent media being more important than ever- it’s a way people will hear an echo of their own voices and thoughts. It’s a way people will hear about what other people are doing. When a group in California is interested in taking on an issue, they can learn about a group in Maine, or perhaps in Mexico or Florida or Iraq, that has taken on an issue, and find out how they deal with it. The greatest threat to corporate power, interestingly enough, is globalization … grassroots globalization.

It’s what those in power fear the most. We can turn their own actions and mechanisms, their own empowerment, against them. When people link up around the world they are a mighty force. We are a mighty force. And I think that’s our greatest hope in this election year.
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Moore as Lefty Messiah (Anthony Lappe)
http://www.guerrillanews.com/media/doc4732.html

Moore as Divisive Crowd Pleaser (Stephen Marshall)
http://www.guerrillanews.com/bunker/west/doc4731.html

Also, check out...

1. Our newest CounterIntelligence feature with Amy Goodman:

The Exception to the Rulers
http://www.guerrillanews.com/war_on_terrorism/doc4587.html


2. Rwanda Redux? (Jim Lobe)

“The failure of the U.S. and the international community to act in Rwanda a decade ago cost 800,000 lives.”
http://www.guerrillanews.com/human_rights/doc4712.html


3. Disconnected (Matthew Yglesias)

For some neocons, the al Qaeda-Saddam link is gospel.
http://www.guerrillanews.com/intelligence/doc4704.html


4. Finally... Last election over 100 million voters did not show up to 'X The Box.' And the presidency was decided by only 537 votes. This time everyone needs to be counted...

https://www.workingforchange.com/vote/vote_center_nf.cfm?itemid=16596&ms=nba

Have a (r)evolutionary summer,

GNN

• Quran (9:11) - IRAQ - VERY INTERESTING - DID YOU KNOW? — Carl, Fri Jun 25 17:17