Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman

 

Younger:  Amy is going to talk about Democracy Now!, but then hopefully you’ll lead into some of the facts that there was no dissent in reports of 9/11 at some point.  But talk about what happened with Democracy Now! and Pacifica, because I think that’s a really wonderful story about what Democracy Now! does.  

Goodman:  Now are you from New York or all over the country?

Younger:  From all over the United States.

Goodman:  And you’re here for a few days?

Younger:  Three weeks.

Goodman:  And is this the beginning or the end?

Audience:  The middle.

Goodman:  The middle.  Okay.  And, of course, all day you’ve had a series of non-corporate independent reporters talking to you about the highest principles.  Oh, is Jon supposed to come today?  He just returned from China, right.  Okay.  I’ll start out, for those of you who aren’t familiar, with Pacifica Radio, the network I come from, just explaining what that is.  Pacifica Network was founded more than 50 years ago in 1949, but a man named Lou Hill who refused to fight in WWII, came out of the detention camps and said there’s got to be a media outlet that’s not run by corporations that profit from war, because they beat the drums for war, and that’s how Pacifica was born.  A network run by journalists and artists.  As George Gerbner of the cultural environment movement, not by corporations with nothing to tell, and everything to sell.  So Pacifica Radio started with one station in Berkeley, California, called KPFA in 1949.  It pioneered the idea of listener support, which we all know from PBS and NPR now, but it was started by Pacifica.  Not making slick back-room deals, not seducing people to buy things through advertisements, but simply asking listeners to support what they hear.  Then we grew to 5 stations.  KPFA in Berkeley, 1949; KPFK in Los Angeles went on air in 1959; WBAI here in New York in 1960; WPFW in Washington in 1977; and Houston station, KPFT in 1970.  When the Houston station went on the air, its transmitter was blown up twice by the Ku Klux Klan in the first year of operation.  The only radio station in the country to ever have its transmitter blown up.  And when the exalted Cyclops went on trial, he said it was his proudest act, because he understood how dangerous Pacific Radio was.  The idea of opening the airwaves to those who’d been marginalized, I think very much the majority of society, because the corporate media just gives you this drum beat of the minority elite, and I’m not talking about people’s color, hearing the same voices over and over again that represent the establishment.  And at Pacifica, we opened up the airwaves so that people like Paul Robson, when he was banned everywhere except in a few black churches in the United States, knew that he had a safe place to come to, that he could be heard, he could speak at KPFA.  Or James Baldwin could debate Malcolm X over the issue of the effectiveness of non-violent civil disobedience --sit-ins, at WBAI early in the 1960s.  And that’s what the Klan was so afraid of.  The idea of hearing people speak for themselves.  When you hear someone speak and tell their own story, it necessarily breaks down barriers and bigotry and challenges the ignorance of those who can stereotype someone by speaking for them, and that bigotry and hatred is what fuels groups like the KKK, so it was very threatening.  Most recently, I think that Pacifica was endangered.  Endangered almost became not dangerous.  Underwent, starting in 1998-1999, was going through a transformation, and the very forces that we critique and cover all the time were taking over the board, and it’s no surprise. . . . We had a representative of one of the largest real estate companies on the board, someone from the National Association of Homebuilders, its major foe is a big lobbying group in Washington, major foe of environmentalists and the disabled because they fight for access and environmental regulation.  Another one, a corporate lawyer from Epstein, Becker & Green, a law firm that boasts on its website that it fights to maintain union-free workplaces.  The very issues and corporations that we are constantly investigation.  And as more and more of them came onto the board, we started to feel the pressure more and more and they started to talk about selling the stations, because we were very valuable audio real estate.  WBAI isn’t at the bottom of the dial, like the educational stations, like the other public radio stations, we’re right in the middle at 99.5 because we were a commercial station, world-broadcasting, before our station was given over to the Pacifica Foundation.  KPFA, the same, has a commercial license in Berkeley, California.  So our station alone here in New York is worth $200 million, and if they could sell us off, they’d get rid of this iconoclastic independent station, and they’d make a lot of money.  So when one of the representatives of the real estate industry on the board, who was becoming the treasurer, wrote an email to the Chair of the board saying, “Let’s continue our discussion of the sale of these stations,” by mistake, he sent the email, because both of the email addresses started with “M,” sent it to the Chair of the Board, to the leading media-democracy activist in San Francisco, who held a news conference saying these are their plans, this is the email, he admitted it was his email.  That was broadcast on KPFA that night, and when they went after the producer who broadcast the news conference held by the media democracy activist, the person who’d be brought in to get control of the station, brought in security to go after him, he ran into the newsroom while the news was on, and the news director said, “Well, it looks like we’ve got to interrupt the news to bring you news of what’s happening right here,” as he was screaming, “Please don’t hurt me,” because these were armed guards that had been brought into the station, and as they dragged him out, they had to drag out many listeners who’d come down to defend the station, this was the summer of 1999, and they dragged out the whole newsroom and the director and the staff, and then they closed the station down and they chained it down for 23 days in the summer of 1999.  It only opened after 15,000 people, the largest demonstration in Berkeley since the Vietnam war, protested in the streets chanting, “Who’s station?  Our station.”  And they won their station back.  A bastion of free speech and they talked about what was happening and the threats to our network.  Then the board, as if that wasn’t enough, went after WBAI here in New York, in Christmas in 2000, which we call the “Christmas Coup,” they went after our station.  They changed the locks and they started to throw out producers one by one.  The most successful programs were the shows they went after, and as they talked about professionalizing the network, the fact was they were going after the shows with the largest and most diverse audiences. They were going after the most successful shows because these were the greatest threats to their corporate takeover.  They had the biggest listenership that would fight back, and they wanted to  neutralize the network and then change it.  But the listeners of WBAI, joining with listeners all over the country who are understanding now exactly what was taking place and what was at stake, fought back and never gave up. It was amazing.  At the beginning, 1,500 people turned out just one cold night after Christmas at a union hall and by the end of the year there were still 2,000 people at the union hall, just having an organizing meeting, and there were protests all over the country to fight for all of the stations and the changes they were undergoing--boycotts of the stations when we live on listener support--until finally the network was forced to back down, the board was forced to resign.  Juan Gonzales of the New York Daily News who was my co-host on Democracy Now! quit on the air to announce he was leading the challenge to the corporate takeover, until the corporate vultures, as he put it, were forced out, and he led this listener movement, and it was a remarkable grass-roots campaign, what we call a corporate campaign where because the people on the board were not responding, they went after the companies that they worked for and they led or threatened boycotts against those companies, and it was then the companies with their very clear, vested interests, that then said to the board members, you have to leave.  And it forced each one of them off until they all resigned.  So now that all happened.  By the end of this whole thing Democracy Now! was forced off the air, we were forced out of WBAI, and we went to a firehouse in Chinatown, DC-TV, a community media center where we began broadcasting, and it was at the end of August last year, just a few weeks before September 11.  Then September 11 happened.  We were broadcasting, our show is a daily national/international human rights news magazine, at the time that the second plane hit the second tower of the World Trade Center.  In fact we were doing a piece on the significance of September 11 in 1973--that was the day that Salvador Allende, the democratically-elected president of Chile, died as the Pinochet regime rose to power and thousands of Chileans were killed.  We were doing a piece on how more documents had come out, had been declassified, further implicating Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Security of State and President Nixon, implicating them in the rise of the Pinochet regime and the coup against Allende and his death.  And that’s very significant, actually, when you think about all of the tings that have ensued since September 11, because after September 11, while we continued to broadcast that day, we didn’t really know what had happened.  Often, those closest to ground zero, and we were very close, had the hardest time understanding.  We were in the garret of this old firehouse and we couldn’t quite see outside.  We heard a crash and that was it, and then downstairs DC-TV started opening the doors, providing water for people, phones for them to call their loved ones, and people were stumbling down the street covered in ash, we brought some people upstairs and just started to talk to them on the radio, and just broadcast it.  We were banned from the Pacifica airwaves at this point.  We were broadcasting to all other community stations, but all of them just kept us on.  WBAI was forced off the air because it was at Wall Street and they had to close that whole area.  In the end, ironically, we were only ones at WBAI broadcasting.  As those days unfolded, we never left DC-TV, the firehouse, because we knew the National Guard, the Marines, the police, would force us out because we were in the evacuation zone and we didn’t want to be caught, and we wanted to continue this awesome responsibility we had to broadcast and to bring out the voices of people who had gone through this, but also, as it very quickly became clear, from the beginning, the war machine was mobilizing, so to deal with two things: the terrible agony of what happened on September 11, and then to deal with the fact that it might be happening somewhere else very soon, that there would be a second ground zero in Afghanistan.  So I’d walk out late at night and see the people covered in ashes, they were involved in the whole recovery operation, and all those pictures started to go up at New York--at the hospital walls on the outside, Union Square, the pictures and colored Xeroxes of people who had died at the World Trade Center, but they would say things like, “If you’ve seen my son, he was last seen on the 97^th floor, please call his mother,” and it would give a number.  There were people holding their cats or their husband, their partner, their mother, their father in these beautiful innocent pictures.  Thousands of them.  And as we saw them going up and people walking with them, it make me think of the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina, mothers who walked in the Plaza de Mayo, holding up those very similar pictures that said, “If you’ve seen my granddaughter, if you’ve seen my son, please let me know, this is what he looks like.”  Because what happened on September 11 in New York and Washington, when the face of terror came to U.S. soil, but it was something all too often people around the world have known.  And unfortunately, in those cases, it’s all too often because of the United States.  For example, Chile.  You look at the record of those who’ve been involved in those crimes against humanity, like what happened here and like what happened in other places.  Now, before I get to the perpetrators and how we covered them, what about the heroes and the survivors?  There were people like Rita Lasar, who is a 70-year-old woman who lost her brother, Abe Zelmanowitz, on the 27^th floor of the World Trade Center.  He could have gotten out.  It’s an amazing story, actually, that more than 90 percent of the people got out on September 11.  That’s incredible.  Around 3,000 died, though.  Actually we’ll never know the real numbers because of the undocumented workers that died.  We’ll never know those numbers.  Family members afraid to come forward now because of the increasingly close relationship between the INS and the police, and because companies won’t step forward with a roster of names of the workers they employed sometimes for more than decade, if they didn’t have papers.  So we’ll never really know how many people died, and this is a number that will go down in history.  Those uncounted in life will go uncounted in death.  But on that day, people like Abe Zelmanowitz died on the 27^th floor.  We do know his name.  He died because as his brother was on the cell phone to him saying, “Get out!” and he could have easily gotten out, he was there with his best friend, Ed, who he worked with who was a paraplegic, and he said, “I’m not going to leave until the emergency workers come up to get Ed,” so he went down with so many others.  Rita was in the deepest grief she’d ever known, losing her brother, but she very quickly saw what was happening, and didn’t want it to happen to another sister in another part of the world who might lose their brother.  And Rita wrote a letter and it did appear in the New York Times, and it said, “Not in My Brother’s Name,” and she pleaded with President Bush not to cause that kind of pain to some other person who would lose someone in another part of the world.  Or people like Orlando and Phyllis Rodriguez who lost their son, Greg Rodriguez, above the hundredth floor, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald.  They wrote a letter, it never got published, as often these letters don’t, and it was a direct plea to President Bush, “Please, we are in terrible pain, but it won’t alleviate our suffering to know that a mother and father in Afghanistan are also going to lose their son.” Now the news faces on television, on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, you can’t really call then journalists.  They kept intoning this number, 90 percent of Americans are for war.  Well, I never believed it.  I would like to know the question that was asked, because if people were asked, “Do you believe that the killing of innocent civilians, that’s what terrorism is, should be avenged by the killing of innocent civilians?”  I believe more than 90 percent of Americans would have said no.  Americans are a compassionate people, if they’re presented with the facts.  So that’s how the media started to beat the drums for war in Afghanistan.  You would hear people like Rita Lasar tell the story of her brother, even in the corporate media, there were a lot of stories of heroes, as there should have been.  We should know every single person who lost their life.  But when it would come to the second part, the prescription, what these survivors, family members, felt should happen, they cut away from Rita, Orlando and Phyllis, Amber Ahmanson, who lost her husband, Craig Ahmanson, at the Pentagon, he was a graphic designer.  When they wanted to talk about what should happen, how to deal with the situation, they would cut away, and they would go to the terrorism experts.  People like Henry Kissinger and Oliver North.  Maybe the corporate media had it right.  The experts in terrorism.  It takes one to know one.  I don’t say that at all flippantly.  You look at the record of someone like Henry Kissinger.  In Chile in 1973 thousands of people died.  Vietnam: two million, Cambodia and Laos: two million people died.  Look at Indonesia and its occupation of East Timor.  I just came back from East Timor a few weeks ago, where they celebrated their independence--a most amazing event, the newest nation of this new millennium.  This tiny country, this nation of survivors.  In 1975, just before December 7, Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, and President Ford went to Indonesia and met with the dictator, Suharto, one of the longest-reigning dictators in the world.  And they gave the go-ahead for Indonesia’s invasion of Timor.  Ninety percent of the weapons used were from the United States, and from that point on, Indonesia closed East Timor to the outside world and they just massacred the population.  The U.S. following every step of the way.  Knowing in great detail how many people had died, and how they died.  They could monitor through spy satellites in Australia, where the Australian, the actual conversations of Indonesian officers with their underlings in East Timor, directing the massacres, the forced starvation.  Two hundred thousand people killed.  Per capita, the greatest genocide of the 20^th century, and the leaders of this country knew exactly what was happening.  Even the State Department, under Kissinger, saw how grave the situation was and as he flew out to meet with another great leader of Asia, Ferdinand Marcos, the State Department officials were sending him cables saying, “Congress will not tolerate this; will not continue sending military aid to Indonesia for committing this offensive act.” And when he got back to the United States, he assessed the evidence, he called together high-level State Department officials, and he castigated them for leaving a paper trail, and said, “We will not kick our ally in the teeth,” and from that point on, from the republican administration of Gerald Ford, through to Carter, the democratic president and his vice-president Mondale who went to Indonesia and expedited the shipment of helicopters and planes to strafe the Timorese out of the mountainside, on to Reagan and Bush and finally Clinton, who never saw an arms deal he didn’t like when it came to Indonesia.  NBC reported, in his first election, the person who gave the most in his presidential campaign was James Reiti, son of Mauptar Reiti, the Reiti’s own, the Lippo Bank, which became very well known during the campaign finance scandals, was very close to Indonesia.  And you look at how it all started, with Kissinger knowing full well what was happening.  So 200,000 people there, thousands in Chile, look at Guatemala and El Salvador, and I think we’re talking about massive crimes against humanity.  Now, I do think that Osama Bin Laden and his allies should be brought before an international criminal court and tried, looks like there’s a good amount of evidence indicating they were involved with September 11.  It’s just interesting that this newly formed international criminal court in Rome, a place, an international forum of justice, Bush has now just unsigned the treaty for an international criminal court.  But it’s been this way for a while, under Clinton, too.  The Pentagon fiercely opposed to such a court, not for other people, but for U.S. officials.  They’re very concerned that U.S. officials will brought before such a court.  But if we are to route out terrorism, and that is very important, we have to have a universal standard of justice.  When Bush came to ground zero, I remember when he was surrounded by people around there, and they started, “U.S.A., U.S.A.,” I got this chill.  It wasn’t something that gave me a feeling of unity.  I thought that is precisely the message, I think, it is very dangerous to learn from all of this.  It’s not USA, it’s a world community and that we are all together, we are all connected.  In fact, September 11 united us in many ways with people around the world, and together, with the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina and those who lost loved ones in Guatemala, 150,000 citizens killed by their own military, supported by the United States, and all these other countries, they knew well the terror.  I had a friend, a reporter, in Yugoslavia, at the time of September 11, and he was at a funeral when this happened, and he thought maybe people would come up to him and say, “Now you know how it feels; don’t forget it was U.S. bombs that fell on Yugoslavia,” but it was absolutely the opposite reaction.  People came up and gave their condolences and said, “We know how you must feel right now.”  Because people who’ve gone through that suffering, and I’ve heard that in so many places, understand what that pain is, and their hearts went out to the people of the United States that we should have gone through this.  So it was a very different lesson than was learned than those that provided the megaphones for those in power; the stenographers to power, as Chomsky refers to them, and that is the mainstream media.  I think about a photograph in the New York Times.  You know, they have the Portraits of Grief, and they’re doing the obituaries on all the people who died to give you a sense of all of the life that was lost.  It was the photograph of Amber Ahmanson who lost her husband at the Pentagon, and she had joined with other family members who’d lost loved ones, in a march from Washington to New York, and I think this so much depicts the way the corporate media covers voices of dissent.  Amber always wore an American flag like a shawl after September 11, to try to show that peace was patriotic.  And she walked with other people carrying signs saying, “No to war.”  When they got to New York, they had a vigil at Union Square.  It almost became a Peace in Democracy park.  It was amazing.  All the people who lit candles and came and put up those pictures.  Hundreds of people.  Sometimes more than a thousand debating issues of war and peace, but Giuliani made sure to clear that up very quickly, to clean out the park.  But anyway, they went there and had this vigil, and there was a large photograph in the New York Times that showed them having their vigil, and we had Amber’s brother-in-law on the next day.  He was one of those who had walked from Washington to New York.  And the picture was cropped.  It was a photograph of Amber and another man who lost his brother, and they  had their arms around each other and she had the American flag draped around her, and the posters that they were holding were cropped in such a way that there was one that said, “Peace,” but it just said, “Pe” because the rest was cut off.  The other poster above her that said, “No to war,” but the “No to” is cut off.  So you had “war” and “pe.”  The brother of Mr. Petorti who had died in the World Trade Center, “I didn’t walk for physical education,” he said.  So you saw “pe” and you saw “war.”  Well, you know that could just be the cropping of it.  And her wrapped in the American flag.  Let’s see what the caption said.  It said, “Family members of those lost at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon grieve.”  Nothing about what they stood for.  And there she was, wrapped in the American flag, and there was just a little sign that said “war.”  What we see when it comes to coverage of war in the mainstream media is no surprise.  You look at the Persian Gulf War.  At the time, Westinghouse owned CBS, General Electric owned NBC.  They were two of the largest nuclear weapons manufacturers in the world.  They made most of the parts for most of the weapons in the Persian Gulf War.  So what you see is a military hardware show.  And you see this parade of retired generals, who are put on the payrolls of NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN.  Put on the payroll.  Paid to say what you’d expect them to say.  There’s no range of debate.  Well, maybe a little bit.  Should we go from an air war to a ground war.  That’s the range of the debate.  Not should we do this at all.  I went to an awards ceremony for the Overseas Press Club, foreign reports, particularly covering wars, and I did ask Frank Sesno of CNN what he thought about this.  I’d asked Christiane Amanpour the same question a few weeks before, of putting generals on the payroll.  You can get the Pentagon’s point of view for free, why put these guys on the payroll.  And I said, “It’s fine to hear what they have to say, but have you ever considered putting peace activists also on the payroll.”  Or forget paying them, just inviting them into the studio to respond.  Frank Sesno said, “You know, we’ve talked about this.  But no, we wouldn’t do that.”  I said, “Oh really, why?”  And he said, “Because generals are analysts, and peace activists are advocates.”  I said, “Would you ever consider interviewing someone like Noam Chomsky, and he said, “No, I don’t personally know him.”  That’s what it’s come to.  Who you surround yourself with.  Let’s talk about who these journalists party with, and who they spend their time with, and that is, who they cover.  I’ll tell you the story of the Overseas Press Club awards, because--has anyone ever heard me tell this story?  I think it very much shows you a lot about the way the mainstream media works.  I had done a documentary with another reporter, Jeremy Scahill, who was a reporter in Yugoslavia where he lives now.  In 1998 we went to Nigeria to look at the way oil companies who were operating in the Niger Delta.  Here you have Africa’s most populous country, oil-rich country, providing much of the oil to the United States, and what happens in the Niger Delta could never happen here, because we have the media here, and the media, because of all sorts of reasons, primarily racism, are not going to focus on what oil corporations do in Africa’s most populous country.  I’d been inspired to go there years before by a man named Ken Saro-Wiwa.  He had come to the United States and one of the only interviews he was granted, because that’s the way it works in the media, that you’re granted an interview, was at WBAI.  Now I actually had not heard of him at the time, 1994-1995, but people knew that he would have a chance at WBA--that someone might interview him.  So they brought him to the morning show that I was doing with my co-host Bernard White, and someone said that this guy from Nigeria’s here to talk about oil and Shell, and we said we were really bugged, but we’d give him three minutes.  Bring him in.  Ken started talking and it was truly amazing to meet--to be in the presence of this great man.  I’d never heard of him before, but as he talked, we bumped all the rest of the guest for the morning and he just talked and talked about what was happening in his company.  The nexus of corporate power, Shell, together with the military dictatorship, and in Nigeria it was Sani Abacha, supported by the largest superpower on earth, and that was the United States, and this was what he and his people were up against, half a million in Niger Delta, where in his land, called Ogoni Land, Shell had criss-crossed the whole area with gas pipelines, above ground, and the children lived in the shadow of the flame--these flares that were the size of apartment buildings.  So here you had people who were providing power to the most powerful countries on earth, right?  Oil.  Energy.  And yet they were being increasingly disempowered themselves.  And here were these kids who lived in the shadow of this flame, who never knew a dark night, and yet they themselves had no electricity, yet they just inhaled the soot and grime of what this meant.  It’s not allowed in the United States to burn off the gas of these oil pipelines like they do in Nigeria, but the can do it under cover of a media spotlight that is never pointed in their direction.  And Ken took on this power of corporations, the state backed by United States, and when he was in our studio, he said, “I am a marked man, and if I return to Nigeria I will probably be arrested,” which is exactly what happened.  He was tried in military tribunal with eight other minority rights activists, and he was executed by the Nigerian military on November 10, 1995.  Having met him and saw what happened, I had wanted, from that point on, to go to Nigeria to investigate what was happening, and we got a chance right after Sani Abacha died, to go there, and we investigated Chevron, largest corporation headquarter in California.  We found a similar story in another part of the Niger Delta called “Elijah Land.” Chevron, yet another oil spill which happens all the time throughout Nigeria with these corporations, Chevron and Shell, had another oil spill, and the villagers were upset.  They wanted Chevron to clean it up.  It destroyed their livelihood, they were subsistence farmers, their pigs, their mangrove trees, the whole eco-system.  So they went to the barge, the Chevron barge, where they were involved with drilling, and they said, “We want to talk to the top man, the American who’s in charge here.”  They waited for several days, and the Chevron official said that someone would come, and then three helicopters came in, Chevron helicopters, and they thought they were bringing in the Americans to negotiate with them, to clean up and give them jobs, instead these Chevron helicopters disgorged Nigerian soldiers and police known as the “kill and go” and they opened fire on the villagers on the barge, and they killed two of them, they critically wounded a third, and they wounded up the bunch of them and put them in the notorious Nigerian jails.  So imagine this, San Francisco where Chevron is based.  A group of environmentalists go there to protest an oil spill, and the U.S., the National Guard or the police, just gun them down.  It can’t happen here--well, I won’t way it can’t happen here, it can’t happen to certain people here, but they could do it there with impunity.  So we uncovered this story, it was a story that the people of Nigeria knew well, but we brought it to the United States.  So we did this documentary called, “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship,” and Chevron, we went to Lagos and met with the Chevron officials and they admitted everything, “Yes, of course we brought in the military, and yes they gunned them down,” just because they don’t expect any reaction.  I actually went to a Chevron shareholders meeting after that in California, I got in on the proxy of the Ursuline Sisters of Tilden.  I didn’t wear a habit, I just went in, but it gave me a chance to ask a question of the CEO, Ken Derr, at the time.  And I said to him, I was the first questioner, and I said, “Mr. Derr, would you stop the policy of killing Nigerian villagers on your sites,” and he said, “No, that’s ridiculous, of course not.  Next question.”  All the press was there, the trade press, the San Francisco Chronicle and others, but do you think they even bothered to report this?  Seems to me this was news.  So anyway, we did the documentary and we won some awards for it, among them, the Overseas Press Club award.  So this is how we ended up at this dinner.  Jeremy and I were deciding whether or not to go, it was a little expensive, $125 per plate, even for the winners, and we couldn’t afford that.  But we thought, you know Tom Brokaw is the master of ceremonies and he would have to say the title of our documentary, “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship,” and that was worth recording.  So we thought we’d go and stand at the back and we’d have our tape-recorders.  So we went to this black-tie event and it started with an official getting up, of the Overseas Press Club, and welcoming everyone there, and saying that reporters overseas face terrible danger, and we want to applaud those that have come here tonight, but there are some rays of hope.  By the way, we were in the midst of the bombing of Yugoslavia, this was in April of 1999.  He said, “There are some rays of hope, for example, in Indonesia, the way they treat journalists, they’ve much improved, so have your dinner and then Tom Brokaw will be master of ceremonies and we’ll be giving out the awards.”  For a second I was very puzzled.  I thought he was telling a joke, because if you know anything about Indonesia and how they treat journalists there, well, Indonesia I told you invaded East Timor in 1975, killed a third of the population and in 1990 I got a chance to go to East Timor, it was just reopening because of international pressure, I went there with another reporter named Alan Nairn.  In 1975 when Indonesia first invaded, they lined up the journalists who were covering the events leading to the invasion and they executed them. There were five of them.  On the day of the invasion, as Kissinger was flying off, they took the last journalist, dragged him out of the radio station in Dili, the capital of East Timor, and they shot him into the sea.  He was from Australia.  In 1991 Alan and I went back, he was reporting for the New Yorker and I was doing a documentary for Pacifica and at the time, 17 years into that occupation, there was going to be a fact-finding mission from a Portuguese parliamentary delegation, the first time Timor’s would be able to get word to the outside world, and brokered by the U.N. and we went to see what was going to happen.  And on November 12, 1991, 11 years ago, we had just come in, waiting for this big U.N. delegation to come, and the day before we arrived the Indonesian military shot into the main church in Dili and they killed a young man named Sebastian Gomez, one of many people who’d been killed, and the next day the people marched in the streets during his funeral, and the buried him, but it was the biggest mass march that Timor had ever seen as they put up their hands in the peace sign and shouted, “Viva Independence.  Viva East Timor.  Viva Sebastian,” the man who had died.  So two weeks later, November 12, 1991, they did this commemoration procession in honor of him, and at this point we’d learned that the delegation that was going to finally break open what was going on in Timor decided not to come, and all these people like Sebastian who had taken refuge in the church, had dropped out of school and left their homes because they wanted to speak to the delegation and didn’t want to be arrested before they came, have no protection because this delegation wasn’t going to come.  So they did this procession in March, a protest march, from the catholic church where they had mass that morning, to the cemetery where he and so many others were buried.  And Alan Nairn and I followed them in the procession, we’re asking people why are you risking your life?  This is a land where there’s no freedom of assembly, no freedom of press, no freedom of speech, and they said, “For my mother, for my father, for independence.”  No family was unscathed.  Whole villages had been wiped off the face of the map with U.S. weapons.  That’s what was so incredible.  The whole thing facilitated by army, trained financed and armed by the United States.  So we got to the cemetery, thousands of people were there, and then we saw from the direction the procession had come, hundreds of Indonesian soldiers marching up, it was about eight o’clock in the morning, were there with their U.S. M16s at the ready position.  People got very scared, the kids were at the front, they were holding their hands up in the V sign, but they couldn’t move because on either side of the road there were high walls for the cemetery.  Only the people in the very back could run away, and Alan suggested we walk to the front of the crowd, because although we knew they had committed many massacres in the past, they’d never done it in front of western journalists, and somehow, if we could show who we were, maybe they wouldn’t do it in front of us.  So we took our equipment out, which I always hid because I didn’t want to endanger the Timorese who were speaking to us, I held up my microphone like a flag, I put my headphones on, Alan put the camera above his head, and we walked to the front of the crowd.  The soldiers marched up, the kids were behind us with their hands in the V sign, the soldiers marched up.  Ten to twelve abreast.  And without any warning or provocation, without any hesitation, they came around the corner and they opened fire on the crowd, gunning people down from right to left.  They had passed us and opened fire on everyone around us and then they beat us to the ground.  They first shook my microphone in my face as if to say this is what we don’t want, and then they slammed me to the ground with their rifle butts, and were kicking me, and Alan got a photograph of them opening fire on the crowd, and then he threw himself on top of me to protect me from further injury.  They took the U.S. M16s and like baseball bats they turned around the butts of the guns and they slammed them against his head until they fractured his skull.  We were lying in the road, they were killing everyone around us, and then they lined up in a firing squad with the guns to our heads and were screaming, “Australia!  Australia!  Were we from Australia?”  We knew what had happened to the Australian journalists in 1975, they were all executed, and the Australian hardly raised a peep because they wanted to split the oil spoils, and the Timor gap with Indonesia that were Timor’s.  The mother of the leading journalist at ABC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Greg Shackleton who died that day in 1975, committed suicide two years later because the Australian government did nothing in her son’s name.  So they screamed, “Australia!  Australia!”  They’d stripped us at this point of everything, we were laying on the ground, Alan was covered with blood, he couldn’t protect himself anymore, or me, because he was beaten so badly beaten, he had these electrical shocks going through his body, and then, “Australia!” and “politics, politic,” because just to witness this, they consider that political.  That’s what journalists do, why it’s so important that journalists be all over the world, because they are witnessing this, and they understood the power of that.  So they screamed, “Politic!  Politic!”  They put the guns to our heads, “Australia!” and I said, “No,” and they would kick me in my stomach and I would get my wind back, I would say, “America.  We’re from America.”  The only thing I had left was my passport and I threw it at them, and I was also born in Washington, DC, so Washington, DC, America, and somehow they became convinced of this, so they took the guns from our heads, we believe because we were from the same country their weapons were from, and they would have to pay a price for killing us that they’d never had to pay for killing the Timorese.  They moved on from us, they were killing everyone around us, they dragged an old Timorese man next to us behind us in the sewer ditch, and as he put up his hands in the prayer sign, they took the butts of their rifles and they smashed them against his face.  A Red Cross jeep pulled up at that point, and the soldiers had gone down the road, picking off people between tombstones in the cemetery and we were able to get into the jeep and the Red Cross worker picked up the old man and put him in the front seat and we drove off, and a dozen of Timorese jumped on top of the jeep and on top of us and hung off the spare time at the back, and we drove like that as a human mass to the hospital.  In the hospital, these were where the lucky Timorese were.  Those who had survived, who had not yet died, their friends had dragged them in and they were being operated on.  I felt that the military would raid this place very fast because it’s where the survivors were, but when the doctors and nurses saw us, they started to cry.  Not because we were in worse shape than the Timorese, but because they see us as two things, especially Americans.  They see us as the sword and the shield.  They see our government as the sword, that provides the weapons, that allows something like this to happen, but they also see the American people as a shield, that they know that we have more power to stop something like this than anyone on earth.  That these people are doing all they can, the Timorese, they march in the streets and are gunned down, but that doesn’t happen generally, although it does in some cases in the United States, for people who just call a congressman and say, “Stop funding the Indonesian military.”  It takes very little actually in this country.  So we clearly have a very important responsibility as journalists and just as people in the largest super power on earth.  We left that place and went into hiding to figure out what to do.  We couldn’t stop the killing that day, more than 270 Timorese were killed.  A completely orchestrated operation from Jakarta, from the capital, they surrounded the cemetery, they prevented first medical people and religious people from getting in to perform first aid or last rites, and they picked off the people between the tombstones.  As we decided, going into hiding, that the only way to stop the killing was to get out and report what had happened.  We knew that they would deny that anything had taken place, but then what about us?  What happened to us?  That’s the sad part, but what happened to these westerners.  We got out on the only plane that day.  First we had to clean up Alan, and the Bishop of East Timor, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize, gave Alan a shirt, Alan was just covered in blood, and we tried to clean him up enough to get him to the airport so they wouldn’t figure out that he had been at the massacre site and trying to get on this plane.  We were able to get on that plane out, and when we flew on to West Timor and then to Bali, then to get on a plan to go onto Guam, we called, reported that there was a massacre, as Alan would stay in the line for the hours we were waiting for the flight through the day, I would just take a towel and wipe the blood off the phone every few minutes.  We had gotten out of the country, I just had a towel around my waist which I’d wrapped his bloody shirt in, because we knew that they would deny everything that had taken place.  We also had someone take only 18 pictures of us, of what had happened to us then, and I had hidden those photographs away--the film.  We got on the flight to Guam and when we made it there, they wanted--ambulance met us to take us to the naval hospital but we didn’t want to go there because we knew that the U.S. military would cut off access to us to report, and the whole point of getting out was to report this to the outside world.  So we went to the local hospital, and as they operated on Alan, even on the operating table, he kept the phone to his ear and more than 100 news outlets from around the world called and said, “What happened?” and we just kept reporting the story, and then local photographers had the film developed, and we were taken to the CNN local studio, the cable studio, and we held up the photographs and we described what took place.  We then flew on to the United States and we had a press conference with the national press club--all of the media packed in--NBC, CBS, ABC, everyone, and we said, you know, “Indonesian soldiers, U.S. weapons, gunned down more than 250 Timorese,” and the New York Times and Washington Post reported the story the next day and then the networks went with the story.  And they asked, “You have pictures?”  They said that if they take your photographs, if they beat and ban you, and the Indonesian military has banned us from ever returning to Indonesia, and at that time East Timor which they occupied, where even when you don’t have the pictures, so you don’t encourage regimes like they used to--confiscate everything, strip you, ban you, beat you, and many times kill you, you have to do the story anyway.  Well, until ten days later when some footage got out of East Timor, a man from Yorkshire TV videoed from the cemetery, he was behind some tombstones, and when he saw what had happened, he wasn’t where we were, outside, where the soldiers were, but he heard what he thought was firecrackers, then people came running through the cemetery and he just picked up his camera and started to film.  It’s an incredible film, a testament to bravery of the kids of East Timor, and that’s what they were: 17, 18, 10, 20, 30 and older people as well.  Girls in their catholic school uniforms, old women in their traditional garb as they ran through the cemetery to escape the gunfire.  He filmed and had the foresight to know he would be arrested, and he buried the videotape in a fresh grave every 10 minutes, knowing that he’d be taken.  And he was.  With many other people.  Another whole round were massacred later, brought to army barracks, but he got out that night after being interrogated.  He went to the cemetery, he dug up his videotapes, his name is Max Stall, and he had it smuggled out of the country.  That videotape was shown in Japan, in Holland, and in England.  Ten days later in England, it had such an affect on the British that they did a poll, they said they want to know more about Timor than any other foreign policy issue, at which point CBS correspondent called Dan Rather and said, “I have a story for you.”  So they pulled us into the studio, this is almost two weeks later, and Alan at that point his head was all bandaged, and they interviewed him and they took the footage of Max and they narrated it for ten minutes, this is what happened in East Timor.  And it was very powerful.  So finally the silence was broken, after 17 years from the day after the Indonesian military invaded East Timor in December of 1975 to the time of the massacre, November 12, 1991.  Seventeen years.  CBS, NBC, ABC, McNeil Lehrer, never once mentioned East Timor for 17 years, even though it was one of the greatest genocides of the 20^th century.  Now compare it to Cambodia.  We certainly know what happened in Cambodia.  Genocide against his own people.  The reason we know that, and we should, is because the president of the United States, the secretary of state, repeatedly, because they were an official enemy, spoke out against them, and the press dutifully reported it.  In that case, they should have.  But in the case of Indonesia and East Timor, and this is very much how the press operates, the presidents were silent.  Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, because they knew exactly what was happening.  The difference was that Indonesia was an ally of the United States and they weren’t going to talk about what this client state was doing.  And the press rarely, in Washington, diverge from the consensus.  You can get the Republican/Democrat debate, but rarely are they going to go outside of that.  And because this was supported wholly by both sides, there was rarely a piece in the papers; no mention in the broadcast media.  Sometimes in the printed press.  So the silence was broken.  From 1991 on, a grass roots grew up in this country and every time someone heard about it they were horrified, and despite Clinton’s best efforts, they cut off arms sales to Indonesia.  Then 1999 came around and finally the people won the right, through the United Nations, to have a referendum which they had on August 30.  Clinton to the end, trying to sell as many weapons as he could to the Indonesian army.  He was in New Zealand as the people were voting for their independence, and as the people voted, and what could only be described as one of the most sadistic goodbye operations, the Indonesian military burned East Timor to the ground.  Forced out more than half of the population from their homes and destroyed the country.  This was just three years ago.  I don’t know how many of you followed this.  And Clinton, to the end, supported the Indonesian military.  Just like his Republican and Democrat predecessors.  Only in New Zealand, when the international media was there for these elections, when he couldn’t deny it any more--he knew what was happening, he knew about the hundreds of thousands of people--but he couldn’t deny it to the outside world because the spotlight was there, he finally, after a quarter of a century of what had taken place in Timor, finally did what people had asked for all of that time.  To just say no.  Threaten the Indonesian military and say the US will no longer support them.  And he finally did it.  A few hours later Britain did the same thing, and Indonesia said they would withdraw from East Timor.  That was the end of one of the worst carnages we have known.  So on May 20, a few weeks ago, 2002, after three years of the UN administration, close to 200,000 people, the number who died in the last quarter of a century, but 200,000 living Timorese, survivors, gathered just outside of Dili, the capital of East Timor, and they watched as Kofi Annan gave a speech announcing that this was a country that would become independent, and he brought down the U.N. flag and they raised the red, black, yellow and white flag of the democratic republic of East Timor, and Jose Alexandre Gusmao, the rebel leader of East Timor for all of these years, became the founding president of East Timor.  As the people raised their faces to look at the fireworks after midnight of May 19-20, you could see the tears of awful and pain and joy at what they had accomplished.  But at what a price! 

So, go back to this dinner of the Overseas Press Club and think about this press official, representing the highest values of journalism in 1999.  This was three months before the vote.  This was just after the massacre where yet again, the Indonesian military had come into a church compound and just killed everyone inside right before the vote.  Here was this dinner where this U.S. official of the Press Club got up and said, “We have something to be thankful for, and that is the way the Indonesian government treats journalists.”  Just that week, in fact it was even in the New York Times, and rarely was it in the New York Times, one of these massacres had taken place and they had beaten up journalists in this massacre and threatened them for reporting what was going on in Timor, and they were saying that they’re treating them better.  That’s why I was a little bit surprised when he said, “Sit down, enjoy your meal, and then we’ll give out these awards.”  So I went up to him, I had nothing else to do, we weren’t invited to sit down and have dinner, we were just going to record the event, and I said, “Excuse me.  Where did you get that information that Indonesia was treating journalists better?”  And he said, “Well, I wrote to the foreign ministry and they wrote back.”  And this is a guy from the Overseas Press Club, one of the most prestigious organizations in this country.  “Well I have other information, so I think you should get back on the dais and say that the Indonesian military is one of the most brutal on earth, and reporters are a target of their wrath.”  And he said, “Well, why don’t you fax me that information and I’ll evaluate it.” 

So anyway, we sat back and we waited for the event to begin, and it turned that Richard Holbrook was giving an address.  This is the way the media operates in this country.  He was about to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.  This is something that I have a big problem with, is the way that the fraternizing of journalists and public officials when we’re supposed to be covering them, we’re not supposed to be having champagne with them, but he was there, Richard Holbrook, and he was going off to the bathroom before he gave his report, so Jeremy Scahill and I who were coming to get the award, but we saw him going to the bathroom, so we went over to ask him some questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia, and he just shrugged us off, which he has every right to do, but it was one of the heads of the U.S. Press Club that came up to us and said, “What do you think you’re doing?”  And we said we were asking Mr. Holbrook a question.  “Oh no you’re not.”  And I said, “Well, why not?”  And so she said, “We have made an agreement with Mr. Holbrook.  He never would have come if we allowed the press to ask him questions.”  And I said, “Well I never made such an agreement and that’s ridiculous!  I mean, we’re in the midst of the bombing of Yugoslavia.  This person, Holbrook, is deeply involved with that.  He delivered the Rombliya Accord to Milosevic that provided the pretext for the bombing, and he’s the person to ask questions of right now.”  She said, “He would never have come.”  And I said, “Well, he shouldn’t be here anyway.  That would have been fine.”

Anyway, he gave his address and he was introduced by a producer of NBC, and she said, “I’m here to introduce Richard Holbrook.  What can I say about our Dick?  He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere.  And hopefully he will be our next envoy to the United Nations.  He just had breakfast with me, he had lunch with a friend, he is very accessible.  He may be a tiger on the world stage, but he is a pussycat at home with his wife, Kati. [That’s Kati Morton, who was formerly married to Peter Jennings.]  Hopefully he will be our next representative, this is Richard Holbrook.”  And he gave his speech, and it was a major foreign policy address about what was going on in Yugoslavia.  In the midst of it he said, “I have just learned that the native forces have just bombed radio television Serbia off the air, and I learned it from CNN.  I believe everything I hear on CNN, and so that’s what has happened.”  And people started to laugh; giggle a little.  What would have been different if Milosevic had gotten up and said, “We just bombed CBS,” and a bunch of people had clapped and we would have said, “Yeah, those so-called reporters.”  Well what was this?  Hundreds of reporters who are honoring the highest principals of journalism and they were laughing?  That they had just committed a war crime?  Radio Television Serbia, whatever you think of it, is not a military target.  We went back to the office to see the pictures of body parts being pulled out, you know, the people who apply make-up, the cameramen, the journalists, who were inside.  This was what he announced to the group of journalists, and then he ended his speech, talked about whether we got to a ground war, and Jeremy went up to ask a question.  Jeremy is a young reporter, he was 24-years-old, he was getting this award that night.  And he said, “Mr. Holbrook, I have a question.  Isn’t it true that . . .” and he asked a question about Appendix B of the Rombliya Accord, which was wasn’t the bar set too high, knowing Milosevic would reject it and that would provide the pretext for the bombing?  And as he tried to ask this question, Tom Brokaw got up and said, “Sit down right now.  You sit down and be quiet.”  So he asked for his colleagues to support a question from the press and they told him to sit down and be quiet and step down, and they called security to drag him out of this dinner, honoring the highest principles of journalistic ethics.  So as security was carrying him out, and I was standing at the back, ready to record Mr. Brokaw giving us the award, I said, “Release that man.  He’s just about to win an award.”  And Security looked a little puzzled and they let him go.  So we were standing at the back and then the event began, and another official of the Overseas Press Club got up to introduce Tom Brokaw, and said, “I don’t know how to describe Tom, but you really get a measure of man.  In 1975, think back to 1975, invasion of East Timor, we were in Henry Kissinger’s plane coming from Asia,” and I was thinking back to Kissinger and Indonesia giving the go-ahead for the invasion, and he said, “We would sit and talk.  We had 17 hours together on this plane . . .”  (end of tape) and then he introduces his friend, Tom.  And Tom Brokaw gets up and starts to give the Pepsi-Cola award for good reporting, the Merrill Lynch Award for good business reporting.  This is really how it goes.  You usually hear Overseas Press Club, it’s the over-arching award, but it’s all these corporations that sponsor each award.  Then it came to our category, and we were getting cited, and so he said, “And then to,” and I made sure the tape recorder was on, and he said, “Drilling and Killing: Nigeria’s Military Dictatorship.”  And it was Chevron and Nigeria’s Military Dictatorship.  So anyway, that was it, and I went up on the stage and I said, “Mr. Brokaw, I just want to say thank you, but no thank you.  We can’t accept this award tonight.  I’m Amy Goodman, that’s Jeremy Scahill you  had taken out.  And first of all, repeat after me, the name of the documentary is ‘Drilling and Killing:  Chevron and Nigeria’s Military Dictatorship,’ but we can’t accept it for two reasons.  One is you started this event by applauding Indonesia, which is one of the worst regimes on earth.  No, they haven’t improved their treatment of journalists, and they certainly treat the people of Indonesia and East Timor a lot worse than even the journalists.  And secondly, we’re in the midst of the bombing of Yugoslavia and we’ve been told that this organization made an agreement with the trigger man for that bombing, Richard Holbrook, that we wouldn’t ask questions.  We’re not here to applaud politicians, we’re here to challenge them.  So thanks, but no thanks.”  So I got off the stage, and Tom Brokaw said, “It’s a great country.  And it’s a great first amendment.  Now Pacifica permitting, we will move on with this ceremony.”  And then he went on to give out more awards.  We stood in the back and the last award went to Business Week for their coverage of Indonesia, and a guy came to the back who was in his tux and tails and he came over to say hello to me.  I didn’t know who he was.  He said, “Well, I’m from Business Week.  I’m one of the editors.”  He said his name, and I had known him only on the telephone because Business Week had done this incredible report on Aceh, another part of Indonesia, which is another part you should all know about, Exxon/Mobil has it’s biggest oil and gas field there and they’re killing the people of Aceh, the Indonesians there, the Indonesian military.  Anyway, they had done an amazing report called, “What Mobil Knew,” about Mobil providing the excavating equipment for the Indonesia military to dig mass graves to put the bodies of the workers in.  And the photograph, and I’ll never forget, in this report inside Business Week, was a man holding out a skull.  And we had seen this, and I was shocked, and I called Business Week to interview the reporter and the editor, and they really wanted to do it, but by the end of the day, the lawyers said no.  They wouldn’t do it.  It’s called “privashing” instead of “publishing.”  You do it, but you won’t talk about it.  Because we had asked Mobil to come on too, and they got wind of this, and okay, they did publish it, but they didn’t want them to say anymore about it, to get anymore publicity about it.  And they ended up saying no.  So I knew this report, and I knew it was incredibly good, but I said to the guy, “But what are you doing here?”  And he said, “Well, we just won the award.”  And I said, “But Brokaw said the name of every single piece, and he didn’t say ours because it was Chevron, but yours was “What Mobil Knew”--he didn’t say that.”  And he said, “Yeah, whatever.”  He just said they’re reporting on Indonesia.  So I said, “But when your reporter got up to speak, he didn’t say anything about it.”  And he said, “Yeah, whatever.”  So I said, “Congratulations, that’s very good that you got this,” he got the Merrill Lynch Award for Good Reporting.  That was the end of the event.  And Brokaw was a little embarrassed after this thing with us, so he said, “By the way, Holbrook has agreed to do an interview with you.”  Because he started to get uncomfortable--he’d had this little brouhaha in the gossip press a few weeks before, where he had published “The Great Generation,” or something, I think that’s the name of his book, and Katie Couric had interviewed him on the Today Show where he previously was the anchorman many, many years ago, and she said, “How does it feel to come back to your old haunts?” and he said, “Oh, I got up at 3:00 this morning and I came walking over here and I saw the homeless people lying on the sidewalk and I thought, oh, they’re so lucky--they get an hour more sleep than I do.”  So, you know, I think he started to feel uncomfortable thinking, “ooh, did I just tell a reporter to be quiet?”  So he said that Holbrook said he’d do an interview with you later by the way.  So at the end of the event we went up to Holbrook and said we’d like to do the interview, and he said, “Get lost.”  So I went up to Brokaw and said, “No, in fact, he’s not going to do the interview.  In fact, when we asked him to do the interview, Leslie Stall said, ‘Dick, I’ll take you home.’”  So we said to Brokaw that he’s not going to do the interview, and he said, “I have other things to do.”  So that’s when I went up to Frank Sesno and asked him what he thought of putting retired generals on the payroll, and he said they’d already thought about that, and they weren’t planning on putting peace activists on the payroll. 

So that was the end of that night, and interestingly, the next day, the New York Post did a whole story about this.  And they actually got it right.  It was on page six.  The gossip page of the gossip newspaper, and the headline was, “Brokaw Shushes Kosovo Crank.”  And Jeremy looked at it and said, “That’s strange.  I didn’t see him tell Holbrook to be quiet.”  But anyway, the piece told everything that we had raised this issue, and then it did quote Leslie Stall at the end.  And they said, “What did you think of them doing this?”  And she said, “It wasn’t the time or place.”  And I said, “Well what is a better time than the bombing of Yugoslavia?  What is a better place than a gathering of hundreds of journalists who are supposedly honoring the finest in international reporting?”  The moral of that story:  Tom broke all the rules of good reporting.  Frank says no, and Leslie stalled.  Quite seriously, you see how it all operates.  You see how it functions from that.  And when you have great crimes like we saw on September 11, crimes against humanity like we saw for 25 years in East Timor, or some people saw, and that’s also a crime of the media.  That most people didn’t know this was happening.  It’s not that they don’t care.  I used to have these debates here at Columbia with New York Times reporters in front of groups of students and I would talk about the coverage of Timor in the midst of the killings.  I had one reporter say to me, “Why won’t you just accept that people don’t care?”  I said, “Well, people don’t care if they don’t know.”  I think as I’ve definitely come to the conclusion after September 11 in going around the country, that I don’t believe that most people are for war.  I don’t believe that people think that innocent people should be killed.  I think that if there was an honest discourse in the mainstream media, if we really did discuss alternatives, I think a lot of people would have a much wider range of options to chose from when presented with them, and that is the very serious responsibility of the media in times of war.  It is our most sacred responsibility, is to open up the discussion.  I think it’s absolutely critical now to really break the sound barrier when it comes to dissent because it is being cracked down on more than ever.  And if you are in a position where you can speak, you are doing more than just speaking your own mind, you are protecting people who are not in that same position.  Now we know about what is happening to Middle-Eastern men and certainly people of South Asian descent in this country.  More than 1,200 people rounded up, African-American as well, and that’s true all the time, but since September 11, you have a situation where people can be thrown in jail without charges.  Situations we hear about in other countries.  You have situations where at this point someone can be tried by a military tribunal on a military barge or boat off of a foreign country, a U.S. court, a so-called court, by a military tribunal, they can be tried, you don’t know their name, you don’t know the charges against them, they don’t hear the evidence against them, they could be found guilty and they could be given the death penalty and thrown overboard and you would know nothing about them.  That is actually what Ashcroft has put forward.  These are the regulations that have been passed, and that is not an overstatement.  There’s a group called ACTA, not to be confused with ACT-UP.  The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a bi-partisan group, founded by Joe Lieberman, democratic presidential candidate, and Lynn Chaney, wife of the Vice-President who is head of the National Endowment of the Humanities.  They put out a report called “Defending Civilizations” which was quoting students and professors around the country who are involved with sit-ins or teach-ins or rallies, saying things like an eye for an eye makes this whole world blind, as if the staff of professors made this up.  I was speaking at Scripts College for Women and I told that story, it’s like an enemies list that they are compiling, and the young woman there said, “Where can we send in our quotes?” they considered a sort of honor roll of statements that you could make, and I really thought that was very important, because if we don’t stand up and express ourselves, you don’t have to agree with people, that if we don’t stand up, then those who are targeted are much more vulnerable when they’re standing alone.  That’s what is the responsibility now of the press, a responsibility they have violated over and over again as they just beat these drums for war.  We have to demand that they use the public airwaves in a responsible way, even though they’re private corporations, they’re using the public airwaves, and they have responsibility just as we do, in public radio and public television.  I think you have to support independent media all over the country.  It’s where you’re going to get anywhere close to the truth, but we also have to challenge the mainstream media because they affect so many people.

We have a sacred obligation which is to go to where the silence is and say something.  I’ll just stand by and I hope we can have a conversation about this, saying that no matter what you do in your life, whatever job you have or role you play, that every day we have a decision to make about whether to be the sword of the shield.  Thanks.

Younger:  Some questions?

Audience:  Hi.  My name is James Holland.  It’s really a blessing to hear you in person.  I’ve listened to you a lot on the radio.

Goodman:  Where do you live?

Audience:  Right now in Rochester, New York.  I’m here for other members of my family who can’t be here, who would have liked to enjoy this as well.  I’m wondering if you have any sense of where the state of documentary or concerned photography is now.  I think it’s been probably lagging in an upsurge in popularity that it had in the 70s.  I’m wondering if you see in your goings about, in people you know, maybe photographers you know, if you have a sense that since September 11 maybe something’s even changed there, has it been heavily impacted by media agencies which don’t necessarily support it as much.  I’m not even sure that this is the case, but.

Goodman:  I don’t know as much about the world of photography.  I do know that when I go out and cover, whether it’s the Occupied Territories or Haiti during the coup, East Timor, people like Max Stahl, that it’s usually the photographers you can get much more of the truth from, or accurate descriptions of what’s going on, because they just say it raw.  They’re taking pictures and they’re not as carefully, they’re not monitoring they’re words as carefully as the journalists who work for the mainstream organizations who do see it, but they are so busy couching what they say.  I can’t really comment on what it is for photographers and how they are with their organizations. 

Audience:  I was just wondering, my concern is always sort of, I’ve been in situations where the American press would paint a country as a place in flames, just because it’s a small island and five people are running amuck and they zoom in and they broadcast that, and they present your country in this position.  So I’m always wondering, what can you do if you’re an activist in a small country like that and you’re fighting against globalization or something, and you end up having the unfortunate situation where there is a ware, there is some sort of strife, and usually the media would take the easy way out and just show up, listen to some government line, and say okay, these are some rebels.  Whereas it could be the intellectuals or students or something like that.  How do you fight that?  How do you infiltrate a huge media monster?

Goodman:  That is a classic case where usually you hear conflict described as ethnic strife, in places, like Christians fighting Muslims.  I used to hear that in Indonesia a lot.  So you can’t make any sense of it, when in fact, it is the military that is stirring things up and trying to pit populations against each other.  In Africa it’s always tribal warfare.  It rarely is the case actually now, in the world, the globalize world as we know it today, and I think we just have to demand honesty in what’s going on, and further digging.  The whole anti-corporate globalization movement is a very significant development, and the world connects us all.  It’s shaken up the media too, as much as they try to mischaracterize it, starting in Seattle, this real Gettysburg of the 20^th century, where 50,000 people starting with high school students, college students, nurses, doctors, farmers, people of conscience, religious people, gathered and said “no” to corporate globalization and brought the stories of what’s happening in their own countries.  They were met with massive force.  Seattle, the largest export city in this country, first time since WWII, martial law was declared, and they were met by the Marines, Navy, the police, the National Guard, they were shot with rubber bullets and tear gas.  I think it’s going to take this kind of oppression to put down these popular uprisings all over the world, and in the same way that corporations and corporate states have profited from globalization, so too have people at the grassroots level, using the internet and communicating with each other--that’s what these corporations fear the most, is that we will learn about your country and you’ll learn about ours.  Not through them.  Not through the New York Times or CNN.  The whole independent media movement that grew up since 1999, since Seattle, indemedia.org, is a very important one.  It was people saying no.  We are not going to view this global uprising against corporate power through a corporate lens, through the lens of CNN.  We’re going to be there with our own pens and pencils and video cameras and cameras and tape recorders, and we’re going to document it ourselves.  And we’re going to put that up on the Internet and indimedia.org and as the mainstream media CNN was reporting that no rubber bullets were being shot, we were picking up handfuls of rubber bullets and people were putting the pictures of them on the Internet, and finally CNN had to back down.  They were just quoting the police chief who, of course, was lying.  And indimedia.org during t he battle of Seattle got more hits than CNN.com because people understood that you are not going to get an accurate picture of what was going on there.  Then we see this now all over the world.  Indi-media sites in occupied territories in Palestine are very, very important right now.  The media tows a certain line, and we have to challenge it, but we also have to create our own media organizations and ways of communicating with each other, and if we can’t beat them, we can make them increasingly irrelevant.  Maybe that’s a little optimistic, but we can force them to change because they care about audiences.  You can use their own consumer philosophy against them, because people want something different.  They are very alienated, as you can see in the last election here in this country, extremely alienated.  Most people don’t vote.  People die to vote in other countries, but in this country most people don’t even bother, and then those that do get completely disregarded as President Select Bush was great evidence of. 

Audience:  I had a question about when you and James were leaving from Indonesia to Guam and were in contact with all the press, were you also in contact with foreign press?  Was it all . . .

Goodman:  It was mainly foreign press, yes.

Audience:  So it wasn’t just U.S. media.

Goodman:  Yeah, there was some U.S. media, but it was press from all over the world.  They’re much more likely to report this.  Interestingly, on May 20 when East Timor became an independent nation, most of the press from around the world was not U.S. press.  The U.S. press was hardly there.  President Clinton went to represent Bush so that got some news.  Allen came out and we also went to cover it and we broadcast it every day on Democracy Now! radio and television, because we’re doing television now everyday, it’s a TV and radio show, because we try to bring together the public spaces using public access TV, satellite television, and radio.  Bring together these public spaces in order to effect the national and international discourse, be a part of that conversation.  We’re trying to use every space that we can, because if we don’t use these spaces, the Internet, public access TV, which is something people fought for all over this country, just like the community radio.  If we don’t use these spaces, we’re definitely going to lose them.  We’re trying to bring them together, to have this national show to challenge, what I call “trickle-up journalism” to affect the media that way.

Audience:  Hello.  I want to thank you and to tell you how honored we are to be here with you.  I was wondering if it’s possible if you can talk a little bit about American stand visa vie the Middle East issue.

Goodman:  I would say when it comes to Israel and the Occupied Territories, well, if only the U.S. press treated every life that was lost the way they treat Israeli lives lost.  That should be the model.  If every person, every Palestinian who lost their life, if they were given that kind of coverage, I think it would have saved Israeli and Palestinian lives overall because no one would have allowed this to continue the way it has.  But it’s because some lives are not treated equally that this has been allowed to go on, and now has affected both sides.  I speak as the granddaughter of an orthodox rabbi.  Half my family was in Israel.  I lost much of my family in the Holocaust.  I went to Israel as a child and visited my family, and then I went to cover the occupied territories in 1988 and I saw then, I was going as a journalist and that’s where I left my family, at the green line, and my professors from college who were Israeli paratroopers, and suddenly I would say, “Could you just drive me over to Rumalya,” and they’d say, “Absolutely not.”  And then I saw the deep divisions.  I went on the Sally Jessie Raphael show in 1991.

 

Audience:  That’s my husband’s cousin.

Goodman:  Really?  It was an absolutely incredible experience.  I went because I was rallying against the Persian Gulf war one night on WBAI and it was during a fundraising drive, I said, “We’re bombing the cradle of civilization back to the cradle and we’re fundraising,” and someone called in to tally and one of the people came in and said a producer for Sally Jessie Raphael is on the phone.  So I said, “great” and just kept talking.  And they said, “No, really, you should come to the phone.”  And this woman said, “I was listening to you on the radio in my limousine and we’d like you to come on the program and talk about your opposition to the war.”  And clearly, a good producer had somehow convinced Sally Jessie Raphael to do a serious show.  The wanted me to come down in a couple of days, and I went on the air and asked people what they thought I should raise, because these moments when you can talk to millions of people, it’s a big responsibility.  I thought about what to wear, I could dress as a man dressed as a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman, you know, the way they do those shows, but I decided, and I went over.  It turned out she was having three women for the war and three women against the war.  That was good.  They said to us when we were in the green room, “Listen, when you go out there, Sally doesn’t generally do this kind of show, so we have to make this feisty, we have to make this not-boring, so really jump in there and make this as exciting as any of those other shows.  Don’t be afraid to speak your mind.”  So I thought that’s good.  So we all went out on the stage, three of us against and three of the women for, and the show started.  This was being videotaped and then it goes out across the country a day or two later.  I will answer your question.  She began by going into the audience and she had someone ask a question, and someone said, “What about the fact that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons?” and the woman next to me was Dr. Yolanda Hewitt Vaughn, who was an army captain doctor who said she wouldn’t go to fight in the Persian Gulf war because she was trained to save lives, not take lives, and she looked almost Amish.  Her hair was tied back, she was wearing a long black dress, and she was sitting like this.  And she said, “Well, that’s an important question.  I think it’s important to look at biological weapons that Saddam Hussein might have and also that are right here in the United. . .” and before she could say the word States, Sally whirled around at the back and she came barreling down onto the stage, and I thought she was going to attack Dr. Yolanda Hewitt Vaughn, and I said, “Whoa!  Back off Sally!” and she said, “Get out!  Get out!  Get off my show!  You shut up!  This is my show!”  And Yolanda was saying, “Oh my goodness!”  And I didn’t know--I didn’t watch the show very much.  This is how it works?”  And they’re supposed to then physically defend yourself?  And Sally said, “You be quiet!  You be quiet!”  And people had come from WBAI, because they invited people into the audience, they were chanting, “Free speech!  Free speech!”  Then they stopped the program and the producers came out and started rocking Sally Jessie Raphael back and forth, rocking her, “It’s okay, Sallie.  It’s okay, Sallie.”  And I realized that these people are so insulated, she has probably never heard an anti-war voice.  They convinced her to continue with the program.  She did say, though, that if any of us on this side wanted to speak that we would have to raise our hands.  This is the guests, not the audience.  First show I’d ever seen that we were raising our hands to speak.  But we did go on with the program, and it was interesting, and she played some video from the protests in Washington, and I said, “I want to congratulate you for playing that footage.”  The rest of the media just plays that footage, and who identifies with 10,000 screaming people in the streets?  The reason people do it is because they’re never offered, Frank Sesno does not invite them into the studio to have a civilized discussion, one-on-one, so you have to join your voices together and scream.  It does alienate some people.  But that’s why people take to the streets, is to be heard.  When I was handed the microphone, I said, “I want to congratulate you, Sallie, that you not just show the images of the people protesting, but you actually invite some of us in, and we actually do have a civilized discussion.  There was only one thing more painful than seeing Israeli kids with gas masks, and that was seeing Palestinian children without them.”  And I talked about being the granddaughter of an orthodox rabbi and what that meant, and the show went on.  At the end of it, as I was walking out, the cameraman went like that to me, and everything seemed fine and we walked off and went home.  And the next day it was supposed to air and nothing happened.  And people starting calling asking when it was going to air, so I called the Sallie Jessie Raphael show and they said, “Um, um, there was a problem with the soundtrack going along with the video track.  The images were. . .” and I said, “Yes, I think it’s called a problem with the sound of our voices.”  And she said, “Don’t be like that,” and I said, “Now what exactly, could you technically explain to me what was the problem?  I saw the cameraman going like this, he didn’t seem very distraught at the end of the program.”  And she said, “Well, it didn’t quite synch up.  We got a call from Chicago and Minneapolis that they were having trouble with it.  We had to pull it.”  I said, “Really.  Okay.  Thank you very much.  Bye.”  So I called what she said, Chicago and Minneapolis.  I asked for the Sallie Jessie Raphael show.  I asked to speak to the chief engineer.  I was a concerned viewer.  I said, “Excuse me. I heard that Sallie Jessie Raphael was doing a program on the war.  I’d like to know when it’s going to air.”  And in both cases, the chief engineer said, “That’s so funny you should say that because New York just called and had us pull the program.”  So I called back and I said, “Excuse me.  I just learned. . .”  and she said, “Who did you talk to?” oh, like I would really have them fired.  I said, “This is outright censorship, it’s absolutely outrageous.  Yolanda Hewitt Vaughn was about to go to jail.”  She was being court marshaled.  She said, “How dare you say we put her in jail?”  I said, “I didn’t say that.”  She said she’d invite us back another time, and I said, “No.  You couldn’t gather us together because she’s going to jail.  We had a show.  You videotaped the show.  The videotape is fine according to the chief engineers.  Just play it.”  So she said, “I’m sorry.”  I said I want to talk to the executive producer.  And this is where media activism really makes a difference.  And she said, “He’s a very busy man; he’s not going to talk to you.”  So I got off the phone and I went on the air and I said, “Don’t bog down our switchboard.  Just call the Sallie Jessie Raphael show.”  And I gave out the number.  I gave it out again and again.  And over the next two days they got thousands of calls, maybe hundreds, I’m not sure, but about two years later I bumped into someone in an elevator who’s a producer of the Sallie Jessie Raphael show and she said, “Our whole switchboard was closed down for two days.”  They got so many calls that after two days a producer called me frantically and said, “Excuse me.  We’re going into executive session.  The executive producer wants to know if you’ll cry censorship if we edit the program but play it.”  And I said, “No.  I’m an editor myself.  I would expect you to edit out Sallie’s fit and then you can play the show.”  So they said they’d get back to me.  I asked then to hurry because all the press was calling.  He said, “What!?!”  I said, “Yes, all the press is calling and we have to know what to say.”  So they called back and said, “Okay.”  I gave out the number a few more times, and they called back and said, “We’re going to air it.”  Now the show did air.  Two days later, but this time with headlines around the country, “Things Get Messy With Sallie Jessie.”  So it got some more attention.  So this is a very long story to answer your question to say that the people, the biggest response was from women from southern military bases, who called up and said, “Who are you?  What view?  What party?  We’ve never heard your views.”  Because I was talking all about protecting our men and women, our soldiers, and putting them in harms way, and when you’re going to do that, make decisions about life and death about other people, whether it’s there or here, we have to have a national discussion, an open discussion.  And the people in the military can least have that discussion and they know that.  So these women called and said, “We agree with you!”  Here are mothers and daughters and women who were going off to war, and they agreed.  Just to hear the discussion.  And I think I represent very much the majority of people in this country.  It’s this minority that you keep hearing.  And it doesn’t resonate with people.  They say that the media--they just feel alienated from it, so instead, you have the Jerry Springer shows where people punch each other or whatever, because people are really looking for some real controversy, a discussion.  And you don’t get it between republicans and democrats, so you go to this other forum.  We have an obligation to present all of this. 

Talking about the occupied territories now, it’s completely outrageous how bias the media has been.  We did a story on a woman named Sorahta Sallah who was a Palestinian-American who was killed in Rumalya by Israeli soldiers.  She was 21-years-old.  She got very scared.  It was like 4:30 in the morning.  She heard the soldiers opening fire, and she asked her husband if he would drive to her father’s house down the road.  She had her baby, 10-month-old baby, on her lap.  And they got in the car, and they tried to drive down the road.  The soldiers stopped them, and they stopped when the soldiers signaled that they should stop.  The husband stopped.  And they shot her at point-blank range.  The husband, they shot him up totally, but the actually just let him go.  He picked his son off of his dead wife’s lap and he crawled to the father-in-law’s house.  Sorahta was an American citizen, and the American Muslims for Global Peace and Justice heard this story and they faxed out to the media, and they emailed and they called everyone, and they said, “An American has been killed in Rumalya.”  No response.  So we heard, and we called her father and we had him on Democracy Now! and it was, to say the least, if you’re talking about riveting television, you’re talking about the most important principals of journalism.  You get closest to the story of the people who are most affected.  You have them speak.  You call the U.S. Embassy.  Yes, they admit to us that they knew this American had been killed.  No media--not the New York Times, not the Washington Post, no one had reported this yet.  The father is saying, “My son-in-law comes to the house, he comes with the baby.  Where is my daughter?  She is laying in the car, the ambulances can’t get my son-in-law, they can’t get to my daughter, they finally get to them.  They take the daughter to the Rumalya Hospital.  They put her in the refrigerator.”  He can’t get to her.  Rumalya is not that big.  He can’t get to her for five days because of the state of siege.  He finally gets to her, taking the son-in-law from another hospital so they can bury her.  They can’t even get to the cemetery, so they buried her in the parking lot of the hospital, where they buried more than 2 dozen other Palestinians because the morgue was overflowing with bodies. This is a story you’d think the U.S. media would tell.  Except--can you imagine if she was a Jewish-American?  And I’m a Jewish-American.  I know exactly how my people get covered.  But my people are more than my own religion.  It’s just like I was saying, it’s about a world community.  We told the story of Sorahta through her father, and afterwards we wrote a press release, we transcribed it, we put it on our web site, and we wrote, “Note to Journalists:  Please steal this story.  It’s completely documented.  It’s exactly the type of story you would do,” you know, the New York Post likes the sensational.  “Everything is there.  Take it.”  Then we said to the listeners, “It’s up to you now.  You’ve got to get the media to cover this story.”  So everyone was faxing and emailing.  That day CNN called, MSNBC called, NBC called, because listeners, and this is the role of all of us, we have to push this.  And late that night an immigration lawyer from Los Angeles called, because we have a national forum, which is why I think they crack down on Pacifica, because it was fine to have all these local stations, but once you have a national program like Democracy Now! that’s giving voice to national, the very voices, grassroots people all over the world, and then giving them a national forum, well Gore knows exactly what that’s about--he lost as a result of it.  He didn’t really lose the popular vote, but hearing those grassroots voices giving voice to third parties, and the disaffected, which is the majority in this country, and this is what Democracy Now! is doing.  So this immigration lawyer calls, she said she faxed it to people and people wrote her back and said if you can give me the phone number, the names, there’s also a laziness element to the mainstream media, you know, the sister was in Brooklyn, her father was in Rumalya, her uncle was in Washington, DC, she was born at George Washington Hospital.  Then people emailed me from England, and the next day I’m watching CNN and Christiane Amanpour says, “American was killed in Rumalya this week,” and they went to the home of Sorahta’s father and they told the story, and then the Washington Post and the New York Times.  It’s up to us.  It’s up to listeners, readers, viewers.  And you were asking about how to cover these issues.  We can never give up hope.  If the people of East Timor had, or people in solidarity all over the world had, they would never have this day as an independent nation.  We really have no other choice.  And I do think we can make a difference.  I think that each person makes an enormous difference when they call, and they demand that the airwaves be used responsibly – that people live up to journalistic principals, and just keep on demanding it.  I think the protests that you have outside of Embassy’s and all these places, I think it should be outside the news media.  They are the most powerful corporations in the world now.  Because they not only are powerful companies, Time, Disney, Westinghouse, G.E., Viacom, all these corporations, they also are shaping the way people see the whole world.  And we have to take them on.  And we have to take on NPR and PBS because they’re supposedly the people’s media, and we have to demand that they also open up the airwaves to all voices, not a select few.  Then I think people like Sorahta will be recognized.  That her life will be valued in the same way that the people of the World Trade Center who died, some of them, their lives are valued.  The more we do that, the less killing they’ll be.  Because when people know that someone innocent died, they do rise up.  It’s not a matter of political party or persuasion, religious persuasion or whatever.  People care.  They just have to know what’s going on. 

Audience:  One of the things we’ve been talking about here was the strategy of change from within, and I would be really interested in your opinion.  What do you think of how effective is that in the mainstream media right now.  Is that really possible?  Is that really effective as a strategy?

Goodman:  You mean can people work within these networks?

Audience:  Um-hum.  Yeah, can they make a difference?

Goodman:  I have friends who’ve left the mainstream because they felt, I mean, with one story you can reach millions of people.  The problem is, can you ever get to tell that story, or maybe you get to tell it only once, and that’s another issue.  I really feel strongly that we have to use the Woody/Mia approach of the sensational media and apply it to important stories.  When Woody slept with Mia’s daughter, then every day Woody would walk outside, and it would say, “Woody walked outside,” and they’d tell the whole story again.  The next day, “Mia walked inside,” and then tell the whole story.  After five days on the front page of the newspapers, we all knew the nut of that story, whatever that little news hook was each day, and we were repeating those stories to other people.  It’s the drumbeat that we have to develop around important stories, so that the story in East Timor, for example--I think all of us as journalists, whether you’re a photographer or print journalist or radio--we’re storytellers.  The idea is that people will repeat those stories and want to share those stories with a neighbor over the fence or across window ledges or whatever, and it’s our job to capture them as graphically as we can, with all of the human description, and whether you’re taking a picture or recording someone’s voice or writing about them, and then that story will be told by many other people.  To be as honest and do it in as unfiltered way as possible, to actually let people speak for themselves.  I think that it can make a difference.  I know a lot of people have left the mainstream media because, even if they can get a story here and there, the overall message is very different.  I mean look at what happened in Venezuela or something, with a coup.  The New York Times writing an editorial rejoicing in a coup?  Finally a business leader has taken over, they said, in Venezuela. 

Audience:  I was thinking about that line about irony as being hypocrisy with style, and it seems that the idea that irony is hypocrisy with style, it seems that somewhere between the way in which the news is made and the way in which the news is reported, there’s a lot of irony going on.  I have a question of a slightly different nature, which kind of deals with the role of education to create critical thinkers.  I was watching the news this afternoon and I heard that the mayor of the city has gotten control of the Board of Education, and I was thinking about what his agenda might be for the Board of Education, and how that might impact on the future thinkers of our society who are either going to fall victim to Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, or are going to be able to work outside or perform outside of that box and really become more critical in their thinking and know how to use, gather and use, information.  I just want to know what your take might be on just this idea of education and what people should be doing or as a society how we should be dealing with the problem of the media at the bottom level in educating people first.

Goodman:  That’s a lot of things.  About media being the educator and people like Katie Couric.  I don’t mean to put her down.  I was just thinking because you talked about Katie Couric that her family, I had read this in the National Enquirer or something--sometimes they do pick up those because they’re actually not worse than the mainstream media in so many ways.  It’s just that the New York Times just dress up a little differently--but I had seen this story that Katie Couric’s family owned slaves, and it was this actually very-well researched piece, and why it was relevant was that Katie and Matt, I think, and I think Al Roker was on that show--they had decided to do family trees and to go back in their history and to talk about where their ancestors came from.  This is what made it relevant.  She comes from a southern state, and she took her whole film crew back home, and she talked about the well-tended cemetery that she always remembered, this was the cemetery, and one that wasn’t so well-tended, that was the cemetery of slaves, but she didn’t talk about the fact that her family was the major slave-owning family of that community and never mentioned that in all of the descriptions of what had taken place.  And a doctor, an African-American woman doctor in Washington, DC, did a little research and realized that her great-grandparents were owned by Katie Couric’s great-grandparents or something like that.  But anyway, they had all these pictures of the community, and they talked exactly about who her great-grandfather--you were tipped off to something like her great-grandfather was a war era governor, and then you realized that he was one of the great slave-owning plantation owners.  Anyway, I went up to her at a big event in New York because I was interested in this story, and I asked her what she felt about the issue of reparations, and she asked who did I think I was, and I said, “Just a journalist.  I’m not exactly like you, but just a journalist who is interested because you made your own personal life a public story, why you didn’t talk more honestly about it.”  And she said, “You don’t have the right to just come up to me,” and I said, “But you’re at a public event,” and she said, “You make an appointment,” and I said, “Okay, usually with people like you  it’s not so easy to do that, so we do come up to you at these public events that you’re hosting.”  So I did call her secretary, and they said they would never do an interview.  But I thought it was very interesting, and I think that people, when they open their lives up in that way, that they have to be honest about it.  I’m not saying it’s her responsibility what happened with her family, but once you’re going to glorify you’re family, you should talk about it, and we all have to deal with this very serious issue in this country.  I’m not quite sure where I’m going with the answer to your question, but I think that the media is the major educator/teach of people in this country.  It is again, especially when it comes to foreign issues, the way that people see the world if they don’t get out themselves.  And unless they come from another country, it’s the way they perceive the whole world, and that’s why it is so important that we challenge the media.

Younger:  He also asked about Bloomberg. 

Goodman:  And about education.  Yeah.  Bloomberg is one of the most powerful media moguls and now he’s the mayor.  Yeah, he bought his way into the mayoralty, and no one knew him before outside the circles that he traveled in, and I think it’s very serious that there’s no mediating force between him, and especially the funds, for the schools.  That’s the big thing.  That he gets to join that budget with the main budget of the city, and that has to be protected.  The kids are really suffering in schools in New York and I am really concerned about it.

Audience:  I just have one question because it was mentioned some time earlier today, and I really don’t know the whole story of it, but somebody was saying that Dan Rather had come out and said something that was reported in the foreign press that wasn’t reported in the American Press. . . .

Goodman:  Yeah, he was interviewed by Greg Palast, an investigative reporter with BBC, and he asked him about coverage of 9/11 and afterwards, and Rather, who is led with the rest of them, said something about there’s a kind of super-patriotism that prevents us from being really critical.  And this is the time that we have to be more critical than ever, the shape of our country is completely changing.  They’re passing laws and executive orders, and now they’re talking about elevating this department of homeland security, just the term “homeland” sends a jolt through you.  And that’s going to solve the problem, and it doesn’t even involve the CIA and FBI--that’s untouched, and it’s bringing together these other agencies, which is going to be a vast bureaucracy.  The infringement on civil liberties is very severe, and it will particularly affect, it will affect everyone, but it goes after the most vulnerable people first, and the mainstream media--you see some, there’s some interesting alliances that are forming, conservative congressman are beginning to speak out on different issues.  Here’s Ashcroft saying basically, we have no rights when it comes to investigating terror EXCEPT if you have a gun.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but even when it came to the investigation of the highjackers, when it came to looking at who owned guns and anything that would violate your privacy when it comes to owning a gun, he would not investigate those who owned guns, and I think that’s going to be very interesting.  So you have the NRA and that’s going to join forces in an odd way with people who are very concerned about civil liberties, and conservative congressmen who are concerned about issues of privacy will join together.  So there’s going to be all sorts of interesting alliances that will be important.  There’s so much that they’re going to try to roll back and use September 11 as an excuse for.  We have to continually be there to expose the populations that they’re targeting and the rights that are being violated not in the name of security.  We have to ask ourselves what makes us feel secure, what makes us afraid, and not violate those things.  I think we do have to deal with terror.  I think we particularly have to deal with state terrorism that takes the lives of so many people around the world, and look at who the U.S. is supporting around the world.  Much of this Bush is using to break down to overturn laws that have been passed over the last few years that say we will not sell weapons to human rights-abusing dictators, whatever, and they’re using this as an excuse, like in Indonesia, because of East Timor we don’t sell weapons to Indonesia military, to say that this issue of terrorism overrides any laws that have been passed, and we’ll overturn these laws and start funding these governments to work with us in this so-called war against terror.  You have Rumsfeld now making his way to India, they say, to make peace between India and Pakistan.  What they’re talking about is selling more weapons to India and Pakistan, and that way to bribe them not to go after each other right now, so in order to de-escalate, they will escalate, and he’s making his way by going through the Persian Gulf countries to rev up, try to do what Cheney wasn’t able to do, and that is to galvanize sentiment against Iraq and to begin bombing Iraq.

Younger:  I have a question and a comment.  I think you are so courageous and we all admire so much what you do (Applause).  I also think you can sense that this is an incredible group of fellows that we have here.  I just wondered if you might make some comments--I don’t want to infringe on your privacy as well, but in commenting on the start of a career and making a choice to commit to a life where you’re obviously so responsible to your subjects worldwide.  But it’s got to be a life that’s a little bit tough on family and relationships and all that.  All of you are going to be making those choices soon.  Some of you may choose to use your camera in a similar way, as a voice, but as people start their careers I think it’s important to think about balance, and I thought you might be able to give us some advice on that.

Goodman:  I think a balanced life is a very good idea.  And in the face of all this I find it very hard to lead a balanced life.  There’s so much that has to be done.  I just feel--we all have such a responsibility on so many different fronts.  I don’t really know how to answer your question, except to be good to people in your personal life, and try to work as hard as you can, and to pursue what you believe is right.  Don’t let people tell you that you can’t do something or that it’s impractical because we really don’t have an alternative now.  And if you’re in any position where you can provide a forum for people to be heard, it’s very important to do that.  You’re all involved with photography, and it’s just so important to reflect people’s lives, and I think that photography can do it in a most honest way.  I had this incredible opportunity last year to interview Eduardo Galiano, the great Uruguayan writer, and Sebastiao Salgado, and we were in New Mexico for a weekend, and I couldn’t believe it--I was so shocked that I was interviewing them that I dropped my computer.  They talked about censorship and when you can’t do your work because they breathe it, and Galiano said when he was in Uruguay and the regime was making it impossible for them to say what needed to be said, they were just silent because they couldn’t bring themselves to say false words, to print lies.  I think that you’ll find your personal lives also more rewarding if you follow your dreams and your mission and your desire to tell truth about the world. 

Younger:  Thank you so much.

(Prolonged applause)

Goodman:  And best of luck to all of you.  I have great respect for you being here and starting your careers or continuing them.