AMY GOODMAN: Wow, what an honor it is to be here.
Thank you to the Nieman Foundation. What an honor it is to be here with Laura
Poitras, to be here with Izzy’s family, and with my own family, my brothers and
sister-in-law and my close friend Brenda.
It is so important that we in the press take on
power. I originally come from Pacifica Radio, which was founded in 1949 by a
war resister named Lew Hill, when he came out of the detention camps. He was a
conscientious objector. He said there has to be a media outlet that is not run
by corporations that profit from war, but run by journalists and artists. And
that’s how Pacifica was born in 1949, the first station KPFA. As George Gerbner, the
former late dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of
Pennsylvania, said, we need a media that’s not run by corporations that
have nothing to tell and everything to sell, that are raising our children
today.
And so Pacifica grew to five stations—mine in New York, BAI; Los Angeles;
Houston—fascinating, the Houston station, KPFT. In 1970, it went on the
air, and within two weeks, it’s the only radio station in the country that was
blown up. It was blown up by the Ku Klux Klan. They strapped dynamite to the
base of the transmitter, and they blew it to smithereens. When the station got
back on their feet, rebuilt their transmitter, the Klan blew it up again. Oh,
they blew up the station right in the middle of Arlo Guthrie singing “Alice’s
Restaurant.” So, finally, the third time when they rebuilt their station, it
became a national event. PBS was broadcasting it going back on the air, and
Arlo came back to Houston to finish “Alice’s Restaurant.”
But I think the reason they blew it up is because of
how dangerous Pacifica is, how dangerous independent media is, because it
allows people to speak for themselves. And when you hear someone speaking from
their own experience, whether it is a Palestinian child or an Israeli
grandmother, whether it is an uncle in Iraq, an aunt in Afghanistan, it
challenges stereotypes. It destroys the caricatures that fuel the hate groups.
There’s nothing more powerful than hearing someone speak for themself. It’s not
that you agree with them, but you begin to understand where they’re coming
from. And that’s the beginning of peace. I believe the media can be the
greatest force for peace on Earth. Instead, it is wielded as a weapon of war.
And that has to be challenged. That has to change.
There’s a lot of retrospectives now as the U.S. is at
the same time pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, actually increasing their
presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it’s instructive to go back to 2003, when
the war began, and look at the corporate media at the time. You know, the group, media group FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy
in Reporting, in New York, did a study of the two weeks around Colin Powell,
then secretary of state—I think it was February 5, 2003, giving that push for
war at the U.N., that speech he would later call a “blot” on his career, where
he said the final evidence is in on weapons of mass destruction. FAIR looked at
the four major nightly newscasts in the two weeks around that speech, which was
critical. It was six weeks before the invasion of Iraq, the most critical time
when, as Noam Chomsky says, the media is “manufacturing consent” for war. And
they looked at the four major nightly newscasts—NBC Nightly News, the ABC World
News Tonight, CBS Evening News and the PBS NewsHour. That two-week period,
there were 393 interviews done around war. This is at a time in the U.S. when
about half the population was for war, half the population was against war. Three hundred
ninety-three interviews done. How many were with antiwar leaders? Three. Three
of almost 400. That is no longer a mainstream media; that’s an extreme
media beating the drums for war. That has to be challenged. We need a media,
when we cover war, that’s not brought to us by the weapons manufacturers; when
we cover climate change, not brought to us by the oil, the gas, the coal
companies, the nuclear companies; when we cover healthcare, not brought to us
by the insurance industry, by the drug companies. We need a media that is truly
independent. That, I believe is what will save us.
My brother David and I wrote a couple of books, the
first called The Exception to the Rulers. That should be what all the media is.
It shouldn’t just be the motto of Democracy Now!, “the exception to the rulers.”
The second is called Static. And the reason we called it that is because even
in this high-tech digital age, with high-definition television and digital
radio, still all we get is static, that veil of distortion and lies and
misrepresentations and half-truths that obscure reality, when what we need the
media to give us is the dictionary definition of static: criticism, opposition,
unwanted interference. We need a media that covers power, not covers for power.
We need a media that is the Fourth Estate, not for the state. And we need a
media that covers the movements that create static and make history.
That’s why it’s also such an honor to be here with Laura Poitras, who risked everything. Already she had
been harassed by the government as she came in, inside and outside the company,
but who risked everything, with Glenn Greenwald, making their way to Hong Kong.
Who knew what would happen? Ed Snowden certainly didn’t know what would happen
to him when he gave over these documents. But these journalists—I mean, it is a
very dangerous time for journalists. What would happen to them? You know, under
the Obama administration, there are more whistleblowers and journalists
prosecuted than under all presidents combined. That is astounding.
And yet she risked everything, to what ultimately has
changed the world—the information that has come out about surveillance, about
what kind of country we want to be, what do we want to represent in the rest of
the world, whether we’re talking about surveillance at home or we’re talking
about detention at Guantánamo. I don’t even like to use the word “detention,”
use the words of the state, because they’re so often propagandistic. “Detention”
suggests short-term—that’s not imprisonment, it’s detention. It’s hardly
detention, and they are hardly detainees, when they are held for more than 10
years without charge, most of them cleared, and yet they remain at this prison
camp. All of these need to be discussed.
We need independent media, which is also—I see this
award for all of my colleagues at Democracy Now! We began 19 years ago as the
only daily election show in public broadcasting. We were broadcasting on eight
community radio stations, very proud, thought we’d be going through the primary
season, and when the election happened—it happened to be the second election of
President Clinton—then this project would wrap up. I actually was called to be
the host of the show—I was at an underground safe house in Haiti. You know, in
Haiti, people were gunned down when they went to the polls, in places like
Timor, as well. But in our country, most people didn’t even vote. So I thought,
“Well, why do an election show?” But that actually intrigued me, because I
never thought people were apathetic in the United States, but I wanted to know
what people at the grassroots were doing. How were they engaged? Why didn’t they
vote? And so, we used the primary system as a way to go from state to state to
see what people were doing in their states. And after the election, there was
more demand for the show than before, and more and more stations started to
pick it up.
And then September 11th happened, five years later,
September 11, 2001. And that week we happened to begin a
broadcast—coincidentally, September 11th—on the first TV station in New York.
It was a public access station, Manhattan Neighborhood Network. We went on as
emergency broadcasting, the closest national broadcast to the World Trade
Center. And then it just took off. TV stations around the country would say, “Can
you send us video cassettes?” That was back then. And we soon were—the Fed Ex
and the mailmen were picking up garbage bags filled with video cassettes, when
we would—when they would play the video cassettes each day, then the radio
station in the town—first it was Pacifica, then community college stations, NPR
stations, saying, “Can we play this show?” And then PBS stations were saying, “Well,
can we broadcast this program?” And now, 19 years later, we’re broadcasting on
over 1,300 public radio and television stations around the country and around
the world, translated also into Spanish, our headlines, because Spanish media,
Spanish-language media, suffers from the same concentration of corporate
control of the media as the English-language media does. We need independent
media.
I really see the media as a
huge kitchen table that stretches across the globe, that we all sit around and
debate and discuss the most important issues of the day: war and peace,
life and death. And anything less than that is a disservice to the servicemen
and women of this country. They can’t have these
debates on military bases. They rely on us, in civilian society, to have the
discussions that lead to the decisions about whether they live or die, whether
they’re sent to kill or be killed. Anything less than that is a disservice to a
democratic society.
Thank you so much. Democracy now!
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