Tenacity of journalist Goodman praised

Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now" is considered by many progressives to be a national treasure.

“Amy Goodman has taken investigative journalism to new heights of exciting, informative, and probing analysis,” Noam Chomsky said of the journalist, speaking Tuesday in Olympia to benefit KAOS Radio and TCTV.

And KAOS, The Evergreen State College’s public radio station, was among the first to broadcast Goodman’s syndicated show, which can be heard on KAOS and seen on TCTV, Thurston County’s community access television station.

“Democracy Now” began during the second presidential campaign for Bill Clinton, said John Ford, KAOS’s development director.

“That’s how long the show’s been on, and that’s how long we’ve carried the show,” he said. “It was originally meant to be just covering the conventions, but it grew, as you can tell.”

Since then, Goodman has written three best-selling books and was the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” for developing a model of independent grassroots political journalism.

And she’s faced risks while reporting; she and her colleagues were arrested last year while covering the Republican National Convention.

“We are facing a series of catastrophic events – global warming, global warring, the global economic meltdown and a health care crisis in this country with tens of millions of people uninsured and tens of millions more hardly insured,” Goodman told The Olympian earlier this year. “These are the moments that depend on what ideas get amplified and discussed, and for that we need an independent media forum for all of these ideas to be hashed out.”

Ford said he appreciates Goodman as a listener, not just as someone who’s in radio. “She goes after the story and asks the questions that need to be asked,” he said. “This is becoming a rarity in journalism at the national level because people are getting their hands tied. Amy’s in a position where she can go where the story leads, period.”

A substantial group of KAOS listeners definitely feel the same way, he said.

“In radio, you don’t always hear what’s going on until you do something people don’t like,” Ford said, “but there are exceptions, and Amy Goodman is one of them. Her followers get upset if we’re a a minute late starting the broadcast. The phones start ringing.

“I am sure there are some listeners for whom our sole purpose is to make sure Amy gets on the air,” he added. “I think we’re a lot more than that.”