Targeted Individuals Canada: Amy Goodman

"What many of her critics want from Amy Goodman is for Democracy Now! to speak truth to power on the most important issue of our time. We all know from her past that when she speaks truth to power she can move mountains. Many of us also believe that we’re running out of time waiting for her to get moving."- Scott Loughrey

Iraq and immigration - "...Simply that it beat the drums for war. As Noam Chomsky says, the media manufactures consent, and they did it for war. There were so many people all over the globe who were protesting the war. In February 2003, millions of people marched, yet the Bush Administration went forward, enabled by the Democrats. The media act as a megaphone for those in power, the Democrats and the Republicans. When the spectrum of debate between them is very small, that’s as far as the media will go. In the lead up to the invasion, the Democrats joined with Republicans in authorizing war. The media overwhelmingly presented that point of view, that pro-war position, even though most people in this country were opposed to the war. And now the latest news we find is that the Democratic leaders like House Speaker Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, and former Senator Bob Graham were briefed for years on waterboarding, on torture. Where was the protest? On Democracy Now, we’ve just spoken to Henri Alleg, the French journalist who was in Algeria, now in his eighties, who describes waterboarding as if it were yesterday. Because when you yourself are tortured, you never forget. He described what it meant to feel like he was suffocating, not “simulated drowning” but actually drowning....We just did an hour with Lou Dobbs, who could probably be compared to Father Coughlin, though he denied that. I did the interview with my co-host Juan Gonzalez, who writes for the New York Daily News, a great journalist. We tried to stick to the facts. We asked Dobbs about assertions he continually repeats, like a third of our prisoners are illegal aliens. Well, it’s just not true: 6 percent of prisoners in the state and federal systems are immigrants. And that’s divided between legal and undocumented, well below their representation in the population. If you keep hammering away that a third of the prisoners in this country are illegal aliens, then people are going to feel that they shouldn’t be here. It’s the litany of misinformation, of lies, that really makes people afraid and turns fear into full-blown hate. I think that has to be exposed. The beauty of community media is that we break the sound barriers, that we open up the microphones for people to speak for themselves. And then it’s harder to call people labels. I think it’s an epithet to talk about illegal aliens. They don’t sound human. You can set any kind of policy on a population when you don’t talk to them as human beings. This drumbeat against immigrants has really turned many Republican Latinos against the Republican Party. They feel like this debate has crossed the line to anti-immigrant and racist, as opposed to a legitimate debate on what we should do about immigration..." (Amy Goodman Interview)

Illuminati-driven themes - "...Amy's brand of Illuminated propaganda is of a different caliber and flavor than the Illuminated propaganda we hear from NPR (National Public Radio), for instance, but it accomplishes the same goal: inculcating Illuminati-driven themes among listeners under the guise of news coverage. The casual listener will not realize that Amy's insightful and thorough coverage of legitimate (but under-reported) news stories-such as the current Greek street protests taking place due to the (intentionally) intense 'austerity measures' being imposed by the IMF upon the people of Greece (or of the Arab Spring protests/ demonstrations, or the CIA drone missile attacks in Pakistan upon unsuspecting civilians, or the unjustified slaughter of innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.), is interspersed with 'other' news stories that carries the drone propaganda missile to unsuspecting listeners. Yesterday, for instance, Amy reported that cesium was found in the blood of some people located within 25 miles of the Daiichi nuclear plants in Fukushima, Japan (of course she didn't mention how much cesium was found or whether it was at a life threatening level). That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who understands that one or more mini nuclear bombs were exploded at Daiichi on March 11, 2011 in order to account for the "hydrogen gas explosion" or the "meltdown" myth..." (Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!)

the frontlines of power, corruption, and war - “...These are the casualties,” Goodman said in a telephone interview. “We are involved in three wars – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, now perhaps Syria and Yemen. War takes these young men and women to kill and to be killed. It is so important that we continue to spotlight what is happening. It falls on us in civilian society to lead the discussion about whether these soldiers live or die; not to do so is a disservice to our military families.” The host of Democracy Now!, the 15-year-old news program now on 1,000 TV, radio and satellite outlets, is the general at the head of a worldwide brain trust – a staff of reporters and producers collecting information behind the frontlines of power, corruption, and war around the globe. At this moment, some are in Athens preparing to sail to Gaza with activists and cover renewed attempts to break the blockade. Unlike much of the mainstream media, Democracy Now! pursues stories in depth and goes back to them. It has broken stories that have trickled up to wider circulation elsewhere. It’s “not any one issue which is of critical importance, but the issues of war or peace which can destroy nations,” Goodman said. “People are drowning in Minot, and nuclear reactors are flooded in Nebraska, all due to climate change. War and peace, climate change, economic equity – these are the issues that determine how we live and die. This is why we have to take them so seriously, in order to grapple with them head-on...” (You can’t keep a Goodman down)

dare to criticize - "...She deplores the growing trend of journalists being “embedded” in corporations, the military, and government. On Friday, Goodman described war reporters “sleeping with troops, eating with them, being protected by them”. “The problem,” she says, “is not only being embedded with troops, but embedding with the establishment”...He said that Goodman’s “empire” is not for profit, has no advertising, no corporate or government sponsors and no political affiliation. Beers says that Goodman “is partisan in that she dares to act on her values. Why the hell else would you want to be a journalist?” Goodman goes where establishment journalists fear to tread. She believes in showing the impact the powerful have on the powerless. Dead children. Dead women. Maimed civilians. This, as she said in Vancouver, will be a spur to action: “Show the pictures, show the images, show the reality of what’s on the ground and then people will do something about it.” During her speech, Goodman noted that “I’m thrilled that they let me into your country tonight”—a reference to her ill-fated November 2009 visit to Vancouver when an overzealous Canada Border Services Agency, fearing she might dare to criticize the then-upcoming Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games, detained her from her speaking engagement for hours..." (Crusading journalist Amy Goodman challenges establishment media)

break the sound barrier - "...It's extremely important to break the sound barrier every way we can because the more TV channels there are, the more illusion there is that we're getting diversity of opinion, but what really matters is who owns the media and how many media moguls there are and how they operate...Get involved with it. Make media. Use Public Access TV, get involved with independent radio and independent media in this country and around the world. There's no better way to understand independent media or support it than by doing it. There's no better way to understand how it works than by making your own. Build independent media and challenge corporate media because they control the airwaves. Whatever we're involved with we need to recognize that the media are the most powerful institutions in the world. They really determine so much about what people understand about the world and about what the rest of the world understands about us..." (Conversation with Amy Goodman)

Amy Goodman (1957-) is an American progressive broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter and author. Goodman is the principal host of Democracy Now!, an independent global news program broadcast daily on radio, television and the internet...On November 25, 2009, Goodman was detained for upwards of 90 minutes at the Douglas border crossing into Canada while en route to a scheduled meeting at the Vancouver Public Library. Canadian border officials interrogated her and her colleagues on their intended topics of discussion at the meeting. After extended questioning, it transpired that they wanted to know whether she would be speaking about the 2010 Olympic Games to be held in Canada. "I was completely surprised by what he was asking and did not know what he was getting at. I'm an anti-sports fan," she told a CBC Radio interviewer. "At Democracy Now, we don't cover sports much." Goodman was eventually permitted to enter Canada after the customs authorities took four photographs of her and stapled a "control document" into her passport demanding that she leave Canada within 48 hours. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann commented: "If you‘re that desperate to prevent criticism of some Olympic games, you shouldn‘t detain a noted commentator and write her scripts for her." Dave Zirin of the Huffington Post quotes Derrick O'Keefe, co-chair of the Canadian Peace Alliance, as saying: "It's pretty unlikely that the harassment of a well-known and respected journalist like Amy Goodman about whether she might be speaking about the Olympics was the initiative of one over-zealous, bad-apple Canadian border guard. This looks like a clear sign of the chill that the IOC and the Games' local corporate boosters want to put out against any potential dissent." ...On March 31, 2009, Goodman was the recipient (along with Glenn Greenwald) of the first Izzy Awards for independent media, named after journalist I. F. Stone. The award is presented by Ithaca College's Park Center for Independent Media (Wikepedia).

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Saturday, December 10, 2011

Amy Goodman