The Journalist Who TERRIFIES Corporate America

0:00We understood then as the soldiers marched up, was there any hope here? And we always hit our equipment because if anyone was caught talking to us, they could be killed, disappeared. I slung the tape recorder over my shoulder that I had hidden in my bag. I hold up my microphone like a flag. Alan put the camera above his head. We walked to the front of the crowd. The soldiers marched up 10 to 12 abreast without any warning, without any hesitation, without any provocation. They swept past us, and they just opened fire on the crowd, gunning people down from right to left. We could not succeed in stopping the massacre. We're in an era where absolutely nobody trusts the mainstream media anymore. Audiences are fragmenting, and seeking out truths which align with their world view online. The result has been political volatility,

1:00but it's not a political volatility that the left is necessarily benefited from, at least not as much as the political right. But some of us are trying. You don't have to tell me how difficult it is to build truly independent media. It's expensive, it's laborious, and trying to get a story into mainstream circulation can sometimes feel like pushing a boulder uphill. For 30 years, democracy now has been doing just that, covering global politics for an American audience, holding corporations and politicians to account with impressive tenacity. I'm really excited to be able to speak to Amy Goodman, co-founder and co-presenter of Democracy Now. She truly has been one of those journalists who has dedicated themselves to the first draft of history, witnessing massacres up close, uncovering the truth behind American corporate involvement with death squads overseas.

2:01She's been at the centre of political stories in Washington, and she's even faced a rest for her journalistic work. Amy's extraordinary career is the subject of a new documentary, steal this story, please, covering her work from East Teemoort to the Niger Delta, to Palestine to Washington. And I'm just really excited to be able to pick her brains and understand what it is that drives her as a campaigning journalist. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Amy Goodman, thank you so much for joining us on downstream. Let me just take that gulp of coffee. I can't tell you, Ash, how honored I am, to be directly sitting across the table from you. It really is a pleasure and an honor. The privilege is definitely all mine. You have no idea how often we say Democracy Now when we're thinking about what is it we want to do next? Well, this is what Democracy Now do. So I suppose the first thing that I wanted to ask you about is that on the Democracy Now YouTube channel, your most viewed video is an interview

3:04with the economist Richard Wolfe about the decline of American Empire. Now, once upon a time you'd say, all right, that belongs to some dusty corner of the academy. You might have a bit of a lefty conference and people show up with a tweet in their elbow patches. And if you're lucky, you get 80 people in a room discussing it. You've found an audience of millions of people who are engaging with that kind of theory. What's the number, by the way, Ash? 5 million people wanted to watch that interview. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that that is? The kind of content that is resonating with people at this moment in time. I mean, I think it's happening all over the world. And I'm coming to you from the United States where there is an explosion of interest and support for a new wave, for example, of people. I don't even want to say politicians, of people representing the public in Congress and being mayor and governor.

4:05And there are a lot of issues that they care about. And some people call it sewer socialism. Some people call it pothole politics. Deep concerns I was summarizing at the other day saying it's gas. It's groceries. And interestingly, it's Gaza. And each represents something much bigger than that. But it's a new way of how do we take care of this planet, beginning with individuals, their families, the communities, and communities all over the world? I mean, so that's an interesting thing. Is that you've got these two very different kinds of scale. So on the one hand, you've got sewer socialism, build the infrastructure. You've got the price of gas. You've got potholes. I mean, Zora and Mamdani is a great communicator. And if he's fixing something, he's going to let you know. I saw him fixing a water leak today. This idea of you've got to deal with these little problems

5:07that people live with every day. And then you've got something on the scale of the genocide. Are there tensions between those two things? How do you decide, particularly as someone involved in media, where your attention goes? Do you go big, but kind of far away? Or do you go micro, but very close? And also, you have Andy Bernamous talking about nationalizing the water supply, because as we came into London, we flew in from Edinburgh, the International Festival there. That's what I learned was happening possibly in London. And in the UK, what exactly does that mean? But I think it's everything. It's why local newspapers matter so much. We're losing hyper local news sites. But that's where we all begin. That's where we live. If we deal with those issues, it's not just

6:08and then you'll care about bigger issues. Those often represent the biggest issues, right in your own community. I mean, when an ICE agent comes into town and rips away an immigrant family, ICE of course is the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the United States. I think it's pretty appropriate icing people out. Absolutely terrible. It's a power military force, basically. Oh, completely. In fact, they're talking about investing in millions of dollars in these gloves that have been developed. We've heard individuals talking about the policemen's glove shock them as opposed to a taser, but it's gloves that shock. And but it starts locally. And people care locally. Perhaps more than when you hear it on a national level, it's too abstract. And hearing people speak in their community,

7:14I think about what's happened in Minneapolis, for example. And I know I'm sure your viewers and listeners have heard what happened there with the ICE surge, with the killing of Alex Pretty and Nate Good, and the ripping away of children from their families and other people being taken out of their cars. I think about one woman named Al Yarraman. She's in her early 40s, extremely eloquent. She is autistic. She was headed to the doctor. And ICE smashed her car window. They put their hand into the car. She's the driver. And you know, you have your seat belt across from your shoulder to your waist. And they had either, I don't know if it was scissors or a blade. And they were taking it across or her neck. And she thought, oh my god, these guys have died.

8:14I'm next. But what they did is they cut her seat belt at her shoulder. Ripped her out. She's hanging from her shoulders. They're holding her arms behind her back. She's saying, please stop. I was headed to the doctor. I am trying to process this, understand what you are all saying. Because everyone's shouting, they every one is screaming. And she's arrested, brought to the Whipple Detention Center, the ICE jail, when she gets out, of course, who I want to talk to. I don't want to talk to other people about her situation. I want to talk to Al Yarraman. And she talked about what happened. And then Ilhan Omar, the congress member from Minneapolis, she's the Somali refugee congresswoman. The congresswoman. The most perfectly symmetrical face I've ever seen. She really does. Well, I don't know if that's why the president calls her garbage,

9:16but he does. It is hard to believe. I'm talking about the president of the United States, the most powerful country on earth, or at least it was. And well, he calls the whole Somali community of the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul garbage. And she invited Al Yarr to be her guest at the State of the Union, where President Trump would speak. And she was so injured, she was so hurt, but she was so honored. And she went. And so we talked her about that experience. We said, wait a second. Now you're going to be in the congress to hear this address. Could we have you want to get after? To absolutely, we're going to have her on the next morning. So she goes to the State of the Union. You might have heard about this. President Trump, I think it was the longest state of the Union address in history. The Republicans were standing up applauding, sitting down, standing up applauding, I mean, sitting down. And it would have been the same if it was the other way with the Democrats, but to say the least raucous. And the guests are up in the gallery,

10:17where Al Yarr was. She was between a police chief of one town and a mayor of another who were also guests like her invited. And he starts to denigrate the Minneapolis community. And she stands up in silent protests. Just stands at her seat. I mean, I don't know if you could even see her as people were standing up, sitting down, standing up, but the security saw her. And they dragged her out. They dragged her out. She stood up silently. So this is now happening to her a second time. We didn't know this. We were just wanted to have her experience of being Congress. She's arrested. She's led out like four in the morning. She did have a date with us at eight. You stern standard time when we do Democrats now. She heads into the studio. We didn't know all of us had happened to her. And she was where I said to her, can you, what are you talking about? And she said, I'm wearing the same clothes I wore last night because I came to you from the state of the union after my arrest. But I made a commitment that it would be on your show.

11:17And then she tells this gruesome story again. And this documentary about Democracy Now steal the story, please. The title of it is because, as Alia told her story, all the networks picked it up. Here was a woman telling her own story. And that is why I think Democracy Now and Independent Media is so important. We don't have the pundits on who knows so little about so much explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong. But the person herself, and as she told her story, the New York Times reported the Washington Post, she's picked up on the networks. I consider an exclusive a failure. Well, so this is one of the really provocative things in the documentaries. You say an exclusive is a failure because what you want is your colleagues across the industry picking up the story, taking up almost like a battle standard for themselves and really running with it. And I wonder if there's a sort of political provocation

12:22in there, which is an exclusive is very individualistic. And it's about me and my status as a journalist. And look, I got the scoop. And this is a way of, I guess, seeing journalism a bit more as a collective enterprise across different outlets. And I want people to steal the model of Democracy Now. Independent listener, viewer, reader, supported around the planet. And that's how you can get by. I mean, we just celebrated our 30th anniversary. And. Mushola. Thank you. Thank you. At Riverside Church, where Martin Luther King spoke a year to the day before he was assassinated, he gave his speech against the Vietnam War, April 4, 1967. And he said, my country, the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence on Earth. He was castigated by the corporate media, right? Life magazine. I have a copy of the Life magazine.

13:23I think they said something like he had done it to service to his cause, his country, his people. But he just doubled down. And he said, we have to take on the three pillars of materialism, militarism, and racism. That is a true sanctuary of dissent, that place. And that's what I think of public media as radio and television. It's what I think of Navara media as. It's what I think of independent cinemas, art houses as, public libraries as, sanctuaries of dissent. We have to make dissent come in place because dissent is what will save us. But let's talk about the model. And I really want to know what the editorial processes like inside democracy now, because at the end of the documentary that we're talking about, still the story, please,

14:23we're taken to October 7, 2023. What was that editorial meeting like when the news is coming through about the Hamas attacks? What are you thinking in terms of how do we cover this story? How do we anticipate what's coming next in terms of the Israeli military response? How do we frame this far audience? What were those conversations like? I mean, it's based on what's happening. That day was actually a Saturday. And I was spending the morning at a hundredth anniversary of a Jewish socialist camp where people like Marissa Tomei went and many others. And they were having a big celebration at a community college in New York. I remember it was pouring rain. And then I was headed to the local mosque at New York University where a friend's son was getting married.

15:25And all of this was happening as this was taking place from this huge Jewish gathering to a Muslim gathering. That was Saturday. That was just a day in the life. And then, of course, we do the show Monday through Friday. And it's just as it's happening, we're learning, we're trying to get the voices on. Who would have thought it would be a revolutionary act to speak to a Palestinian journalist? I mean, that's where it's happening. But according to the rest of the media, it is astounding. When you see what's ensued over the next two years, the lack of voices of just Palestinians, whatever their view, I'm not talking about sound bites of an official. I'm talking about people describing their lives. That's also why I think hyper-local media is so important. And that's where you start in this. Because that's when people identify.

16:25When you've got your arm around your baby and you're trying to ensure that your baby survives that night. That's what it's not about Republican, Democrat. It's not about a political position. You just identify. And it's hard work. And I want to say it, democracy now, I am part of a brain trust of love. I mean, people deeply committed to independent media, videographers, journalists, producers, graphic design, directors, camera people, all committed to the same thing to ensure that we get as close to the story as we can. And the only time we tell someone else's story, instead of them telling it themselves, is when they're afraid, when their livelihood is threatened, when their own life is threatened, when there is a reason that they can't speak, then we get people closer to them who can tell the story,

17:27until they can tell their own if they can. And that's the power I call democracy now, news with a heart. And it's news with a heart because it's people describing their own experience. And there's nothing more powerful. I think it's also why there's such a large youth audience. Because young people connect with authenticity. And it's not one political line. It's understanding when someone is pulling the wool over your eyes, when someone is just repeating something that they have heard, but that's not actually what's happening. And that's what we try to do every single day. Interrupting this episode of Downstream to let you know that tickets have just gone live for our next Downstream IRL. We are super excited that mega big deal, cultural theorist Catherine Lu is making her way across the pond. She will be in the UK with us for an event on trauma farming,

18:31all about the commodification of suffering in the attention economy. And if that's not enough for you, we will also be joined by Darren McGarvey, aka Loki. Basically, we're going to be talking about how pain became a leading personal brand. During us at Earth Hackney on Monday, 21st of September, doors open at 6.30, so come along. Look, your friends in the eye. Get a drink at the bar, just get off your screens for one evening. Looking forward to see there. What do you make of this emerging cohort of right-wing journalists who have actually begun questioning and calling out the American government's backing of Israel? I mean, do you think someone like Tucker Carlson really cares about Palestinians? You mean the America first party? Yeah. That Marjorie Taylor Green, Tucker Carlson, Congressman Massey from Kentucky, who was very vocal with Ro Khanah from California,

19:39Massey and Khanah, in demanding transparency around the Epstein files. It is in its infancy, and I mean, well, probably a lot, you can learn a lot from just their name, America first. I think we are so far beyond that, unless they mean by it that the only way we can protect our country is by protecting everyone, but it don't exactly think that's what they mean. Let's talk about that sort of relationship between the only way we can protect us is by protecting everyone, because when I was watching Steel the Story, please, I was thinking, what would a right-wing critic say? And so somebody like David Goodhart, who's a sort of right-wing communitarian, he's got this theory of somewheres and anywheres.

20:41So he says that somewheres are connected to a real sense of place, tend to be more socially conservative, they care about themselves, their families, the people in their immediate communities, tend to have lower educational qualifications, so it didn't necessarily go to university and all that, don't tend to move very far from where they live. And you'd say that anywheres are people like me and you. All right, so live in big cosmopolitan cities, have big cosmopolitan values, often went to university, very comfortable with social change, and quite fast moving social change, and his accusation would be we're more interested in other places than we are the nation, our home, our immediate communities. And he would say that organizations like Navara or indeed democracy now, we're media for anywheres, we're not media for some words.

21:42And I was wondering what you would say back to that critique. Well, this is the first time I have heard that. And one of the things that the documentary still, the story, please, explores is where I come from is my Jewish background. And I think that is informed so much of how I view the world. And I'm not really speaking from a religious place, a secular place, but the fact that my family came out of the Holocaust and some survived and some didn't, that people came ultimately to the United States. My grandfather, my mom's father was an Orthodox rabbi who ran a Shiva in Brooklyn. My father's grandfather was the Henry Street rabbi on the Lower East Side. He was a Haceda rabbi and that went back to my great,

22:42great, great, great grandfather who is the Balsam Tove, the founder of Hacidism. But I was imbued with a sense growing up through my education. I went to both schools. You know, I went to Hebrew school. I went to regular school. My mother went to a Shiva. She went to religious college and to Hunter College, the public school. Everything was just sort of done parallel until in her last semester, senior year at Hunter and it, I think it was Jewish Theological College. She said, I'm gonna follow this secular route. Why am I trying, she would do her homework on the subways between the schools and she was coming home and she came out of the subway and my grandfather who would, you know, be with a top-at-area mecha waiting for her and then walking home said, you know, Dad, I think I'm not gonna finish

23:45with the other school. He said, fine. And she said, fine. After all of these years, you don't care. I did this for you. You're just saying something. And so he said, whatever you want, Thadala. What era name was Dara Thetaari? Whatever you want. I mean, and that, I had these long conversations when my grandfather walking through the streets of Brooklyn, him with his hands behind him back, his back at his waist and we would walk. Many people as we pass, they would say, good day, father. Hello, father, although he was a rabbi. He could have been a priest, he could have been a rabbi, he could have been an imam. And we debated everything and that's what was encouraged. And so your apostrophe, I'm actually such a somewhere. This is so rooted in the sort of experience of the Jewish diaspora in New York. Nowhere else could have made me. Well, it really was about seeing what could have happened.

24:45And I was always stunned when I was growing up that when I learned about the Holocaust, that non-Jews helped Jews, that a Christian family would help a child and hide them in the barn when they're jeopardizing themselves. You know, the story of Anne Frank, of course. I mean, hidden in an attic, a whole family. And why would non-Jews do this? Why would someone who's Christian was only everything to lose? I, you know, they're called the righteous and that is absolutely true. And I think I was imbued with this sense from very early on, never again for anyone anywhere. So maybe with the somewhere or the anywhere. I mean, and especially in the world we live in with the internet connecting us all, we are so connected everywhere.

25:48And that is what I deeply believe that we cannot get by unless we all get by. And so we have to care everywhere in each of our communities and we have to ensure we all move forward. One of the things which I like the most about the documentary is when you talked about your family newspaper. So you went the first, Joe, when you were a family. It was your brother. My younger brother, Dave. Three brothers, my younger brother, Dave. But when he was eight years old, he started Dave's press. And I'm very proud that we just did a swing through Vermont. He's a Vermont journalist. And I was with the editor in chief of Dave's press. He's my brother. Yes, at eight years old, he put out, I'm not gonna say we put out the family newspaper. I just done everyone for money. My grandfather, my great aunts and uncles, my cousins. You've got to pay your one penny subscription per year

26:49or you're not getting this paper. And then I would put the newspaper under my parents pillows and my brothers pillows, I would slip it under people's doors. And there were some exclusive stories including the day where you got hiding from your mom. I think that we call it a spanking, yes. And my mother was absolutely furious and she sat David down, the editor in chief of Dave's press. And she said, David, you are not to air anything personal in this newspaper. You're not to cover that. And he said, but mom, this is the news of our family. Like right now, and she said nothing personal, David. And he cried censorship. And he really cried because he was eight years old. So this is where we debated the Vietnam War and the letters to the editor page. My grandfather would write, dear Dovetl, I so admire you and your newspaper. But I have to say, I disagree with your views on war. And David, right back, dear grandpa.

27:52I love you so much. Thank you for being the first subscriber to my newspaper. But your views on war are stupid. And that's, and then my uncle would weigh in. And he would say, Shoma, Shlomo is his name, Solomon. How could you criticize your beautiful grandson, David, like that? And that's how it would go. I mean, do you think I feel a little bit that we're in an age where you can't have love and disagreement at the same time? That's exactly what we learned we could do. I mean, my friends, when they would come either for Shabbos dinner, Friday night or any dinner, they'd say, my God, you guys talk to each other at dinner. We just eat. And I'd say, we try to remember to eat. And we don't really have food fights, but we have roaring battles. Yeah. But still, I love my family. And that's what I learned from an early point on

28:52that the two go together. It's not just they don't take away from each other, that it's an expression of love to debate and discuss the critical issues of the day. I think people see things really differently now. So like in one of my, you know, little side jobs, I'm moonlight as an advice, not really economists, it's on a podcast, but an advice columnist. Oh my gosh. And so often get these dilemmas. I'm advice on what? So everything, because I'm very nosy. I'm very nosy. I just want to know whatever's going on. I don't have to know the thing. I'm the same. I just need to know. And very often I'll get dilemmas written in from, you know, younger people, often, you know, young people of color who themselves have radical politics saying, you know, I've got this friendship with someone whose views are really opposed to mine and I just can't feel friendly towards them anymore. Or a big one is, of course, people feeling very divided over the genocide and it's such a morally stark issue

29:55to go, I just feel that if you're in the wrong side of this one, how am I supposed to preserve any kind of respect to a relationship for you? And, you know, I think the Vietnam War is obviously a hugely polarising moral issue as well, but you guys were able to hold it together, whereas I sort of think in this day and age, if you were to say, well, actually, you'd still need to love each other across these differences and hash it out. Some people might look at you and go, well, you're not politically committed enough. It would become a test of your political commitment. It doesn't mean that you're changing your views, although it is very helpful to hear people express different views, but that you can go back and forth, that you're confident about how you feel and you appreciate, I mean, I learn so much from people in all different ways and I'm less likely to cut someone off,

30:57then I mean, maybe the next argument will change. Do you think that you're one of life's alt-timists? Yes, I think there's no question. You know, on the big issues like democracy, I don't ever think you achieve it. I think you have to fight for it every single day. But I think that fight, the process matters. We have to treat people with respect, with love, with care, but we also have to move forward to make things more just. And I think there is a value in that. And yes, we're experiencing some very deep valleys right now, where people are stopped from moving forward and we just have to keep going. When you first started with community radio, so WB AI.

31:59Yes, I'm really bad at my colleague Bernard White, who you see in Still the Story, please, who might be a love at colleague, we did wake up call some many years together. As he would say, we be all in this together. WB AI, we be all in this together. I mean, I just, I loved the footage from that time and it was just so beautiful. There was such warmth that was in it. Is that it also sort of made me think, what was it like at that point, thinking about American race relations, right? There's you, East Coast, White Jewish women, there's Bernard White, only thing white about him is his name. You know, what was that editorial relationship like when you're telling the story of a moment where you've got a black power movement, you're following after the assassination of Martin Luther King, you've got the rise of the black panthers and the Puerto Rican young lords. What was it like for the two of you to work together at that time?

33:00We navigated our way through it all. We came from very different worlds. We came to know each other's worlds. He also was a stained glass artist. And every time I go to the home of the editor and chief of Dave's press in Vermont, I gave him this beautiful stained glass that Bernard has made and to this day it hangs in their living room window. But I love Bernard White and we covered so many different issues together. And when Dave I say came, as you saw and steal the story, and I want to say the directors of the film, Carl Dio and Tia Lesson are a big deal and they teach us many great lessons. Oscar nominated work for Michael Moore for years as producers did an amazing film about a hurricane, Katrina, called Trouble the Water. They found that footage, like you're talking about me and Bernard in a radio station in 1996 at WBAI.

34:04It was actually Martin Luther King Day, 1996. We weren't doing TV, but they said, wow, when Maurice Bicom came into your studio, when they interviewed me I talked about these great moments. Is it with any video footage? I said, it's a radio station. And so they said, I know, but to Daniel, I said, oh wait a second. One of the local stations wanted to film this and then someone else, I don't know if anyone else had a camera, it was such a big deal. And what touches me most is when Maurice Bicom, I mean, Dave I say in the United States, he started story core, which is people talking to each other. It's like peer interviewing, there's peer counseling, this is peer interviewing. So you bring your grandma into a van down the street or he builds a little booth for people, and you bring in your coworker, and you interview each other for half an hour.

35:04This has become enormous. Thousands of interviews and hours now being archived by the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. And Dave had gone to Angola Plantation Prison, which was this prison of thousands of mainly African-American men. And it was called Angola, because it used to be a slave plantation, and that's where the slave came from. The slave came from. The slave came from. And Maurice was there from 1958 to... Who's Maurice Bicom? Maurice Bicom was just a guy. A young man, two white sheriff's deputies came to his home. They often, they also happened to be members of the clan. And they shot at him, and he picked up his rifle, and he shot back. He killed them, and there was like a one-day trial, and he was found guilty, and he was given... He was sentenced to death, and he was put in Angola Prison, and he stayed there year after year, decade after decade.

36:09And Dave was doing a story. He had come to... He had called WBAI for us to do a story on something entirely different. To heroin addicts were trying to make a museum on a low-reside, and each day he would call me after... I didn't know who this guy was. Each day he would call me after the news show we did a night, and say, how come you haven't covered this museum that... I said, what museum are you talking about, sir? And so he said, what do you mean? Well, it's not been made yet, but two people have a dream of a museum. I said, I don't even know about it. Sorry, we're covering wars, we're covering. And so, okay, next day, after headlines, how come you didn't cover this dream of these two people who have... I said, sir, after the fifth day, I didn't know if this was a crank or what. I said, you seem to find it so interesting. It doesn't even exist yet. It was a museum. He said they wanted to build a drug paraphernalia. I said, why don't you go do it? And he came in with tape recording of this couple, and I listened to it. In the morning, I was sweeping, I put it on, whatever.

37:13And I said, whoa, oh my God, who are you? This is the way he could listen and draw them out without speaking much. And I asked the other news editor of the WBI evening news. That's what I did at the time. Could you take over the news of the day? I wanna make sure this happens. And we played it, and that night, I gave it to a reporter at NPR National Public Radio and said, this is an amazing piece, and it played on morning edition around the country that weekend. And Dave was gonna be a doctor, and that's what his parents wanted, but he loved doing this. So he heals the world in another way, and he came to me and said, I wanna go down to Angola, and when an interview is almost completely black population, he discovered Marie Speckham. Marie spelled M-O-R-E-E-S-E. Marie Speckham. And he got a lawyer that was Dave did to try to get him out. I said, this guy doesn't believe it,

38:13go, you know, shouldn't be in prison, couldn't get him out. And so he came to me in Bernard, and he said, I don't know what to do. And this is the role of journalism. I mean, so let's sort of like meet you at that point, all right? Someone comes to you and says, I've got this story, I've got this case. So it's not just a story to tell, it's kind of a campaign to run. What's your strategy for it? Just to keep covering the stroke, well, look. You talked about being an advice columnist. I grew up on soapappers, and every day I'd run home, and I would see, you know, in the United States, it was called General Hospital, one life to live. I didn't identify with any of the people. I mean, they were even in gowns in the middle of the day. It was the slaps that I remember. I just love a soap opera slap, just a rule like, perfect. Oh my God. I don't know if I was into as much violence as you are, but I just every day,

39:15would I, and in fact, that's very interesting, you say that because it was precisely that it wasn't violent. You know, all the other TV shows that my brothers watched and everything I grew up with three brothers. This wasn't violence. It was just, you know, who was with who, and then who broke up with who, and then who went off with who, and every day you wanted to find out what happened. Yeah, it was meaningless, but it was exploring relationships, and I was very taken, and I would run home to find out each day. And in a funny way, I, that really is a model for me with a news. I don't just do a news story, and you know, okay, we did it, whatever I wonder, if I'll ever get out of jail. Let's go look at something else or another country. Anywhere, nope. What happened to him? We covered that guy. Is he still in prison? And to follow, I mean, the texture of a life,

40:18why should people care, unless we call him on the phone? And then we call Maurice, and we call his grandchild, who he's never gotten to see, and they talk on the phone to each other. And then there's so many ways to cover story, you know, when in the US, the corporate media is very good, when soldiers are going off to war, they go to the base, they interview the family, what's it gonna be like for their family member to leave, they follow them to the bus in each day. It's in a funny way, like a soap opera. And I wanna do the same thing with an activist who's leaving their home, and they're gonna go to a protest, it's pouring rain or it's snowing, or it's a hundred degrees outside. It's not easy to do this stuff. When you could just be playing with your friends, or hanging with your friends, to go out and to do this, and what is it about them? And I wanna give value to what people do, whether they're staying home, or whether they're going off to,

41:18and also by the way, on those soldiers going to war, the media stops at a certain point. If they come back, and suddenly, and I think they're probably, I don't know if you can say there isn't a larger population, those who are against war, than those who come back from war, but there are a lot of anti-war soldiers because they've experienced it. They wanna know why they were in Afghanistan. They wanna know how they were told to go to Iraq. I mean, they cared about what happened on 9-11, and they wanna protect their country, and they're sent then to where? Iraq to save the people there? I mean, to bomb the people there? I mean, what is it? And what did they have to do with 9-11? Were there any hijackers from Iraq? And so when those people came home, they had a lot to say, the media doesn't cover them anymore when they have a very different message, deeply concerned about what our country was doing. And I like to, you know,

42:21we have to follow through on stories, and so with Maurice, no, he wasn't getting out, and then, well, what's the obstacle? Oh, well, the governor decides. And fact, just this last week, we broadcast for two days from Edinburgh, at the, we cover the Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe is absolutely amazing there. That's fair. But while we were there over the weekend into Monday, a case we've been covering, Keith Lamar, a man on death row in Ohio, the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, gave him a three-year reprieve on execution. You don't have this, but it's absolutely unbelievable. In fact, as I speak to you, three people are scheduled to die on Thursday in the United States. Can you imagine? Scheduled to die. The state will kill them on Thursday unless some other power intervenes.

43:21So with Keith, he's scheduled to die January of next year. And the governor said, we're gonna give him and a few other men three more years until 2030 they have to live. Why? Because the pharmaceutical companies don't want their drugs injected into them to kill them. They have a bind here. You've got these large drug companies, and they don't, you know, Harkens back to the Nazis, right? Injecting people with drugs that stop their heart. But interestingly, it's not only that, but the Republican governor of Ohio has turned against the death penalty. He hasn't yet said no, vacated the death sentence, but he has put it off for a few years and we'll see what happens. And so Keith called in, Keith Lamar, and everyone should check out his story. He was nominated for a Grammy for his music. I went to Joe's Pub, which is part of the public theater in New York City,

44:21where a band played in Keith Lamar joined them from Ohio, death row, and he's a musician. An nominated for a Grammy. And he called in from death row, and he talked about what it meant, both what it meant to have this incredible reprieve. I didn't know whether to say congratulations or what it means to say, you will have death hanging over you for another few years. You've got another few years to live. But to continue to tell these stories, so people say, hey, what's Keith doing today? I'm going to be devil's advocate again. I'm going to pretend to be a BBC senior editor. And what someone at the BBC would say is, this is all well and good, but activists have just as much an interest in cherry picking facts, creating a certain narrative because there's a political end that they want to see in the world. So just like a politician or a lobbyist

45:23will come along selling you horse shit because there are things that they want to see in the world. An activist is just as likely to do that. What do you make of the role of a campaigning journalist, vis-a-vis activists? Is it your job to be skeptical to apply pressure? If not, why not? If so, how do you do it? Well, start the same time holding your own values and sense of mission. How do you approach that? I mean, you call it a campaigning journalist. I call it just being thorough. We start to investigate a story. We start to talk to people around that story and we continue to follow it. We are a daily grassroots global, unembedded, non-embedded in the state, independent, international, and investigative news hour. So we continue to cover every aspect of this story. Even the bits, which might make activists look bad?

46:27Even the bits that may activist or non-activists, it's a forum for people to discuss and debate the critical issues of the day. And the media often will have a debate between the far right and the mid-right. So when it came to, for example, Iraq, do we just bomb or do we put boots on the ground? And that's the debate. Well, what about those who don't think you should be involved in a war at all? And so we widen the debate and we widen the number of people who participate in that debate. So my colleague, Nermine Schaeff, who's co-host on democracy now, talked about the frame of the media. We expand the frame and take people who are outside that frame, not only bring them into the frame, but center them.

47:30And who are these people? I mean, I really do think people who care about war and peace, who care about the climate, who care about racial and economic justice, who care about the immigrant crackdown, who care about inequality, who care about LGBTQ issues, are not a fringe minority. I'm not talking about Edinburgh here in the fringe festival, are not a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media. And so we have to build a media that brings in all these voices, that continues to cover these issues, not as some abstract thing, and then you move on to something else. I mean, actually the people you're talking about, the people, and I don't call them mainstream. I call them the corporate media, because I really do think that those who care about all those issues,

48:32they represent the mainstream. That's what I think. When I walk down the street and talk to people, I think the vast majority of people care about all of these issues, and you can have really important discussions, and they will talk about people they know that deal with, that are involved with these different issues, or the victims of, the target of some kind of policy. And that's what we try to get at, get away from the rhetoric, and go to the real fact of people's lives. I don't think we're that far apart. I mean, there's an example that's in my head of a time when our audience got very angry with an interview that we did, with a politician who they saw as being on the left. So the sort of details aren't important, but sort of what happened was,

49:33there was a politician called George Galloway, interviewed by my colleague, Aaron Bistani, he's very pro-Palestine, he was very against the war in Iraq, also quite a socially conservative guy. And so my colleague sort of pressed him, what do you mean by family values? What do you mean? And he said, well, I don't like my children being taught that gay relationships are normal. And so Aaron pressed him further, and he was like, what do you mean typical? And he's like, no, I mean normal. And so we published it. And it became hugely controversial. But there was a really big part of our audience who felt that we fucked him over. And he thought, are you allowed to use that word in our media? I do all the time. Oh, I see. You know, in the United States, you can be taken off the air if it's broadcast. So because this is YouTube, you can even use the C word if you like, it's less offensive here in the UK. But they really felt that we stitched him up. And some of the feedback that we were getting back

50:35was, well, you behave just like the corporate media. And so they might not have carried us much about the issue of LGBTQ equality. So they might not have pushed that. I suppose that the thing which I'm kind of wondering about because it's very rare for me to talk to someone who's funding model is so similar to ours, right? That's so reliant on audience donations, is are there times where you felt the temptation to self-sensor because of how your audience, on whom you are financially dependent, might receive something? I mean, I think we have such a wide-ranging audience. I couldn't characterize what they feel. I should say, you know, I started telling it and somewhere in some stream of consciousness I never finished, but 30 years ago when we started, we went online right away. We were among the first news organizations, but we did that because necessities, the mother of invention.

51:36And the networks could afford to send, this is before the word podcast. Okay, we had an MP3, the radio show, before it was a TV show. 59 minutes, how do we get it to stations? They could afford to pay satellites, we couldn't, so we put it online. And so the radio stations could take it, but then people would take each segment and transcribe it. So someone in London would take the first segment, someone in Texas would take, here to take the second segment, someone in Mexico would take the third segment, they would transcribe it, or there would be a bunch of people on each segment, they would send it to, we hired a transcription coordinator. We post the whole thing online right away. Most networks even to this day don't put full transcripts, but we felt, well, still the story, please. The network reporters would take our stories and because they're transcribed and not your typical pundits, they would take them to the State Department press briefing, White House press briefing, Pentagon press briefing, they would base questions on them.

52:38But my point here is we posted it all online, which built this global audience. I remember one of the networks did do transcripts, but they didn't show them, because the problem was how would they come up in searches if they didn't put the words there, but they didn't want to post them. So it's somehow at the back end, they would put them so they would come up higher in a Google search. We just put it all out there. And that built this global audience from early on. We asked some tech consultants to look at our website at some point, and I think he worked at Fox on the tech end, and he said, you kidding, all the networks are looking at you. I remember when Time Magazine first started, I think they spent $20 million building their website, and they put up a paywall, first mistake. And it failed. And we just kept saying, still these stories please. And the more we did that, the more we reached out, there was a global audience.

53:39I remember once having our endotteroy, the great Indian writer and activist on the show. Some guy calls up from California, and said, it was like three in the morning. He left a message. He said, I heard this Aaron Diddy lady, and wow! And he certainly wasn't a progressive guy. I don't categorize people as easily as others do. I do think liberal and conservative lines are breaking down. They're not as meaningful. And we just take on issues, and we just keep going with them. I take that point that your audience is very diverse, geographically, ethnically, age, gender, all of this. I take that point. But I still am interested in, has there been a time where perhaps a section of your audience has said, I don't like how you've covered this story.

54:39I feel disappointed, betrayed, or you should have done it like this. So I think our audience learns, I think we learn from our audience, and our audience learns from us. And certainly, if someone says you've left out this aspect, so we're interested. And we always say, you know, right? I mean, this is conventional email. A story is at democracynow.org, or respond on Instagram, YouTube, however you want to respond. But if you have a suggestion of someone to talk to and how they can be contacted and what their story is, let us know. This is a dynamic process all the time. It's not, it's not we're putting out a point of view on one day, and that's it, take it or leave it, love it or leave it at all. It's a process, right? The same thing. We never achieve democracy. We have to fight for it every day. And as I said, those debates on the right, do you bomb my air or do you move in the troops?

55:40We've got to not only to expand that debate to why war at all, but also there are progressive debates on every issue. I know that from my family. And teasing out those, having a forum where people say, that's not really a debate at all. Oh, we know it's a deep debate. And really going forward. And we're not perfect. And on every issue, we can do a lot more. I suppose my feeling is that I think that people increasingly see their media diet as an expression of their politics. And that's coming from a real critique. People can see that corporate media has served political purposes that has served the interests of oligarchs and the capitalist classes is how I would put it. People can see that. And they want to support media that they feel represents a different set of values. So it's not just, I'm here because I want the truth.

56:41It's, I'm here because I want truths that I can't get elsewhere. That's an important thing. And there's no the truth. I mean, yes, when it comes to President Trump, he lies continually. It's just astonishing to see and the fact that you can prove it really makes no difference to him. Right? There is something called video and audio recordings. And he says, I never said that. Or he just says something opposite from the truth or with a bombing of Manab. He says, oh, it's fake news. What they put out about the US doing this. When obviously it just flies in the face of the truth. But on that point of truth, just going back to it, there, I want to bring out the voices of people who express also different truths, the truths about their lives that make people say, oh, that's why they think the way they do. You don't have to agree, but you can come to understand. I mean, the media is so important, because unless you personally know someone

57:43and know their views, the way you learn about other countries, about other populations, is through the media. And it's got to be through something other than a corporate lens. I mean, I suppose coming back to that thing of people see it as an expression of their politics, right? And I think that many of your viewers will look at you not just as a reporter, but sort of as an embodiment of a set of values that they align with. And if you were to say for the sake of argument, give Jeremy Corbyn a really hard time, put him under a lot of pressure politically. There are some people who go, I don't like that you did that, because I see him being put under pressure by Sky News and the BBC and the Guardian and the Times. And I'm looking to you to be supportive of left-wing things. You know, how do you guys navigate? I mean, again, I don't see it as a left-right thing. And I want to ensure that we get out views that are so often not heard in the corporate media. And you just keep going.

58:43And you raise these issues. It may not be in one interview, but at different times. And there is so much that is left out of the corporate media, so many people that are left out the vast majority of people and so many different views that, yeah, we have a lot of work to do. In the documentary, the part which was about the work that you guys did in the Niger Delta. So this was during a time when Chevron was operating in the Niger Delta. And what you guys were able to find out, and most importantly, find proof for, was that Chevron was involved in these death squads, right? The Kill and Go team, right? These soldiers who came in and showed up. These Nigerian soldiers or police. And the way Chevron was dealing with them was flying them in on Chevron helicopters

59:45and into the Niger Delta. And you know, the people would protest the pollution of their mangrove forests. And in the case that we found, and I did this with Jeremy Scayho when he started at democracy now. He was a baby. He was in his early 20s. He was like 22, 23 or so. I mean, you see Jeremy there when he started at democracy now. You see Shrufa Dokadouz. Jeremy would go on to co-found the intercept and now drop site news. But yes, Jeremy and I went to Nigeria, the Africa's most populous country. And it was a dangerous time to do so. Like it was a very dangerous time to do so. And let me say that the reason I went is because of Ken Sarawiwa. Now I hadn't actually, I'm embarrassed to say, heard of Ken Sarawiwa, who is this remarkable writer. He wrote soap operas in Nigeria, very popular. But he threw in his lot with his own people, with the Egoni people.

1:00:46And he saw what was happening as, in that case, it was shell corporation, was criss-crossing his community in Egoni land. And they were flaring off gas. The kids didn't know a dark night. And he took it because he was a very prominent person in Nigeria. He could go out globally. And he took the protest against shell globally. And he came to our studio, a Nigerian activist brought him in. And I said, I'm sorry. We have a book show today. They came in like that day, said, well, we're here. And I said, whoo. And they said, Ken Sarawiwa, Ken Sarawiwa. And they said, he only can come today, two minutes. I mean, we'd have to bump someone else for him. And he talked about what he was doing. And I was just looking at this man. He just exuded an aura. And as he spoke, we dumped or bumped the next guest. And next guest. And next guest. And I said, well, are you going back to Nigeria?

1:01:48And he said, oh, yes. I said, what's going to happen? And he said, well, I'm a marked man. And he went home. And he was executed by the Nigerian regime. His brother, a doctor, told us that she'll let approach him and said if you would call off the international protest, he didn't have to die. And I knew then that we had to go to Nigeria. And we discovered this other oil company, Chevron and the Niger Delta, was bringing in the military, the kill and go, the kill and go. And they were killing or arresting journalists. And Chevron is based in California and San Rafael, California. And we felt it was absolutely critical that we tell the story. Tell me about your time in East Timor, because you were there and you were present first-hand

1:02:51witness to a massacre that was carried out by the Indonesian Army. And I was wondering about the line, if there is a line, between being a Western journalist who's present somewhere as powerful by virtue of being from the West, seeing things, witnessing things, and experiencing things as well, you were very brutally beaten from what I understand and not making yourself the story. How do you deal with the subject position in a context like that? I mean, East Timor was just very briefly, because most people don't know about what happened was one of the great genocides of the late 20th century, December 7, 1975. The Indonesian military armed trained in finance by the United States, Britain, did its part. 90% of its weapons were from the United States, invaded East Timor by land by air and by sea.

1:03:53This was 75. It was President Ford, Secretary of State Kissinger. They met with Suharto, the long-raining dictator there. And as they flew out to meet with another dictator, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Indonesia, basically, Suharto felt he had gotten the go ahead that he could invade without the US cutting off the weapon's supply. And he attacked East Timor. And for the next quarter of a century, they killed off a third of the population. So the story is the people of East Timor. And I didn't know about this in 1975. I mean, I, but I was going to Guam to cover fascinatingly an abortion story. It's territory of the United States. And they were introducing an anti-abortion bill. And if Guam approved this and a lawyer there who was Guamanian sued to get the law overturned,

1:04:55this case could go to the Supreme Court. And it could overturn Roe v. Wade in the United States, which ultimately was overturned, but not because of Guam. So I went to Guam to check that out. And I was near East Timor. And I went with my colleague, Alan Nairn, an investigative reporter who had done so much on Latin America, particularly places like El Salvador and Guatemala and the US role there and supporting and coos and military regimes. And after I went to Guam, I went on to East Timor. And it was a hell on earth. I went in 1990 and then again in 1991. And it was November 12, 1991 at the beginning of our trip. We were going there then because we learned the UN was going to send a delegation for the first time to investigate the human rights situation. So we wanted to be there. And it was horrifying still. People were taking refuge in the Catholic churches that have been occupied by Portugal for hundreds of years.

1:05:58But Portugal had pulled out in 74. And the question was, was Indonesia going to invade? And people were taking refuge in the churches. In the Catholic churches, the only place they could gather. And we went to the Catholic church. The women were well and crying in the church. And we learned the Indonesian military had killed a young man the night before. We saw his blood on the steps of the church. And we went around the country. And we learned that at the behest of the United States, the UN delegation was not going to come. And on November 12, the people just went to communion in the morning and thousands then marched to the cemetery where so many people were buried to protest the occupation. They said, free, long live, Viva, East Timor, Viva, Sebastia, Viva, Independence.

1:07:00And when they got to the cemetery, and yes, we were there, Western journalists in the middle of a crowd saying, why are you risking your life? They've killed so many Timurys, 200,000 Timurys. And they say, for my mother, for my father, for my village, it was wiped out. And yes, we understood then as the soldiers marched up, was there any hope here? And we always hit our equipment because if anyone was caught talking to us, they could be killed, disappeared. I slung the tape recorder over my shoulder that I had hidden in my bag. I hold up my microphone like a flag. Alan put the camera above his head. We walked to the front of the crowd. The soldiers marched up 10 to 12 abreast. Without any warning, without any hesitation, without any provocation, they swept past us. And they just opened fire on the crowd, gunning people down from right to left. We, a group of soldiers came at us.

1:08:03They beat me to the ground, Alam Thurum's self, I'm top of me to protect me from further injury. And they took their USM 16s like baseball bats, and they slammed them against his skull until they fractured it. As we lay on the ground, they were shouting, Australia, Australia, are you from Australia? But we knew exactly what they meant. Because in October of 1975, right before Indonesian invaded, there were five Australian journalists in a place called Balebo. There's a very good movie called Balebo to see what happened to them. They were from ABC, Australian broadcast in corporation and other news networks. And the Indonesian military lined them up against a house and executed them. The Australian government hardly protested the killing of their journalists. We believe because years later, Australia and Indonesia would divide up the oil spoils and the teamwork gap. Oil is a source of so much pain in the world.

1:09:04And so we knew we had to be very clear where we were from. No, not Australia. America, America. We were from the same country their weapons were from. They would have to pay a price for killing us. They'd never had to pay for killing the Timuris. And they moved on. A Red Cross Jeep pulled up to help the Timuris. We were able to get into this Jeep. We got to the hospital. The Indonesian military killed more than 270 Timuris on that day. We knew the only way we could not succeed in stopping the massacre of the cemetery where they had all gathered was to get word to the outside world. And so we raised to the airport. First, we had to clean up Allen. He was covered in blood. I went to the bishop's house who would later win the Nobel Peace Prize, Bishop Bello. I asked him to help me. And we cleaned up Allen. He gave him a shirt. And we raised to the airport. Where only one plane was out that day.

1:10:05And somehow we were able to get onto the plane. We didn't know if they'd consciously decided not to kill us. Or there was a gap in communication, but we said we had to leave. We have to use our Western privilege. Because what was happening was because the West was allowing this to happen, was providing the weapons and the support for this to happen. And we got on that plane. We flew to West Timor. We flew to Bali. We had made a call to the West. We said the Indonesian military has committed a massacre at first, Indonesia denied it. And what happened to us? Just the two of us, what happened? I had taken Allen's shirt and I wrapped it under the bishop's towel. But he given me around my waist because I wanted to have the evidence. And someone, we gave them our camera. Someone, oh no, they had taken our camera. But someone took 20 pictures of us and gave me the film. I had secreted away. And they developed it on Guam.

1:11:06And we showed what happened to us then, if you're going to deny that what happened to the underneath, to the Timor East people. And when we got back to Washington, after Allen got out of the hospital, he held a news conference at the National Press Club. And we said this was done with US weapons. And a nationwide movement grew up. There was a movement all over the world, but the US was the main supplier of the weapons. And for eight years, people really rallied as they did all over. I mean, the Timor East were so unbelievably brave. And in 1999, I remember being at the UN on this day. And it's such a lesson overall. We heard that the UN was going to sponsor a referendum for the people of East Timor to get to vote, either for their freedom or to be part of Indonesia. You never know when that magic moment will come. But if you're involved with social change in building a foundation, you won't make history,

1:12:09or you can determine the future. And they said, you know, who knows how it'll turn out? I tried to get back into East Timor for this vote, the Indonesian military caught me twice as I tried to go in through Bali, as I tried to go in through Jakarta, they caught me coming into the country, and they deported me twice. But Ireland did get in. And as Indonesia burned much of East Timor to the ground and the days of the vote, the people of East Timor voted for their freedom. For the next three years, they were run by the United Nations, Sergio Damello, who would die in Iraq, in a bombing. He was the point person for the UN. And I was able to get into Timor the day of their independence and in a place called Tasi Tollo right outside Dilly, the capital, 100,000 people gathered.

1:13:10Shunan Agushmau rose to the podium. He'd been long in prison by Indonesia, the first president of an independent East Timor. The Democratic Republic of Timor, last day of East Timor. He spoke in four languages, putting everyone to shame. And there was this fireworks display. And you could see the light reflected in the tear-stained faces of the people. If East Timor they had resisted and they had won. At an unbelievably, unacceptably high price, but they had won. And they had something to teach every one of us, whether we're journalists, artists, doctors, nurses, educators, employer unemployed. We have a decision to make every day. Whether we want to represent the sword or the shield. Amy Goodman, thank you so much for joining us on Downstream. Oh my gosh, thank you for all that you do.