GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. -- In this audio podcast, Paul Rapp introduces Amy Goodman, host of the Pacifica Foundation's "Democracy Now!" five-day-a-week news and commentary video broadcast, who spoke to about 200 people on Friday, July 16, 2010 at the Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, Mass.
Goodman talks about the growing link between community radio and public-access TV, the need for journalists to be independent of what she called corporate sponsors, and for reporters to "go where the silence is" to "break the sound barriers" and act as "the exception to the rulers." She adds: "An indepndent media can save us . . . media can be the greatest force for peace when it is used to build bridges."
She illustrates these points with stories about her coverage of (and arrest at) the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, Minn.; questionning by Canadian border guards prior to a sspeech she was to give in Vancouver, B.C., and a just-completed trip to document the lack of progress in restoring post-earthquake Haiti. Goodman says questioning and arrests of reporters, and their "embedding" in the coverage of the Iraq and Afghan wars is having a chilling effect on press independence which media should be tracking and covering. For 24 hours, she concludes, the world's media should highlight graphic images of the human toll of war, to show, she said, "that war is not the answer."
Goodman's talk was a fund-raiser for low-power, community, non-profit radio station WBCR-LP in Great Barrington. Click on the carat on the left of the bar below to listen to streaming audio (1 hour, 24 minutes) or download an MP3 podcast for offline listening (20.1MB).
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