Hearing the Voices of People on the Ground
Amy Goodman Amy Goodman received the Humanist of the Year Award at the American Humanist Association’s 83rd Annual Conference, held virtually in September 2024. The award recognizes a person of national and international reputation who, through the application of humanist values, has made a significant contribution to the human condition.
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide. The New York Times has written that Democracy Now!, “distinguishes itself by documenting special movements, struggles for justice and the effects of American foreign policy, along with the rest of the day’s developments.” Goodman has reported on violent conflicts around the world, on unrest here at home, and has been arrested covering protests at the White House and the Republican convention. Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest, Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America, looks back over the past two decades of the news program and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world.
This text is excerpted from Ms. Goodman’s acceptance speech at the Conference.
THANK YOU SO MUCH for that extremely generous introduction. This means so much, not only to me, but to all of Democracy Now!.
I was just with my colleagues earlier today. We’re in a Lower East Side La Plaza, a cultural community garden, celebrating our education director, who sadly just died of cancer at the age of sixty-one. We all turned out to march through the streets of the Lower East Side and to be in this space where her family has a plot of land, one of 100 gardens in the Lower East Side. There are 600 in all of New York that movements fought for from the developers to preserve spaces, to keep the community, the environment, really, more humanist; to make it more possible for people to be able to live in a crowded city.
I went from that to (and you might hear some chairs creaking across the floor) to a synagogue on the Lower East Side where a major event took place all day today. I just came off the stage from moderating the final panel that was put on by Jewish Currents. And what’s so interesting about this? It was Peter Beinart of Jewish Currents; it was Rula Jebreal, the Palestinian-Italian-American journalist; and it was Lydia Polgreen, The New York Times columnist. We were talking about Gaza and the 2024 election. This big event—900 people had signed up for the day—a long series of sessions was thrown out of Brooklyn College. So incredibly sad and such a blight on a city college with a beautiful history. I mean, the idea that people of every ethnicity and every economic strata could study together: that’s the city college system. But Brooklyn College couldn’t take the what they thought could possibly be the heat as this very serious group of nearly 1,000 people took on the issue of Gaza. And so, in the last days, organizers got back on their feet, and they had this event, ironically, at a Jewish sanctuary where they were welcomed.
And I couldn’t help but note that just down the road from here, my great grandfather, Schmuel Kaufman, was the Henry Street Rabbi. 100 years ago, he had fled persecution. He had fled the Cossacks. He had fled pogroms to come to the United States of America. When he died, they closed the Brooklyn Bridge and 1,000 people followed the horse-drawn carriage that carried his casket. It is so important.
I think this country, at its best, is a sanctuary of dissent…because dissent is what will save us. And I think that’s what Democracy Now! has been about for all of its twenty-eight years. It’s hard to believe we started in 1996 as the only daily election show in public broadcasting. I think we were covering the second election of President Clinton and the show was going to wrap up in nine months after the primaries and whoever won the election. But there was more demand for Democracy Now! after the elections than before. Why? Because we were giving voice to the grassroots. People speaking for themselves were using the primary system as just a way to go from state to state, to see what people were doing in their communities.
When Pacifica Radio called me to be the host of Democracy Now!, I was in an underground safe house in Haiti covering elections there. An overwhelming number of people went to the polls. They could be gunned down. Candidates were being gunned down in the streets, and here in the United States, less than half the people voted. I never thought it was because they were apathetic, but I wanted to find out why, when we don’t face anything near the risk in a place like Haiti at that time. What were people involved with? Because that really is the hope, and it’s the hope through to today.
You know, I come out of Pacifica Radio, which was founded in 1949 by a war resistor named Lou Hill. When he came out of the detention camps in the Bay Area, he founded, with his allies, the first Pacifica Radio station, KPFA. The idea was that you need to have a media that’s not brought to you by corporations that profit from war, but brought to you by journalists and artists. And that’s how Pacific was founded. It grew to five stations, the LA station, KPFK, Houston station, KPFT, WPFW in Washington, and my station here in New York, WBAI.
“I think it’s so critical that we hear voices of those who are marginalized…[that have been] silenced by the corporate media. That is why we have to take the media back.”
When KPFT in Houston went on the air in 1970, within a few weeks, it was blown up by the Ku Klux Klan. They got back on their feet, the station started broadcasting again, and the Klan strapped fifteen times the amount of dynamite to the base of the transmitter and blew it up again. It was right in the middle of Arlo Guthrie singing “Alice’s Restaurant,” which I happen to think was a great song. Anyway, it took them months to get back on their feet. In January of 1971 they went back on the air again, and I can’t remember if it was the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan or the Exalted Cyclops (I often confuse their titles), but he said it was his proudest act. Why? Because he understood the power of people speaking for themselves. It breaks down bigotry. It breaks down caricatures that lead to the stereotypes that allow populations to dismiss others.
You know that when you see a Haitian child or you see a mother in Gaza, or you see an Israeli grandmother, or you see the parents of the Israeli-American hostage named Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who spoke at the Democratic Convention. They not only talked about the suffering of the hostages (he had not yet been killed), but they talked about Palestinian suffering and demanded a ceasefire and said what’s happening there must end. And although Palestine at the Democratic Convention was rarely raised from the stage each time it was, including with Kamala Harris, there was a roar as I stood on the floor of the convention throughout those four days when anyone would raise that issue, a roar of applause, a roar of approval.
And I think it’s so critical that we hear voices of those who are marginalized. Because I don’t think that those who care about equality, those who care about war and peace, those who care about the climate catastrophe, those who care about racial and economic justice are a minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority. Silenced by the corporate media. That is why we have to take the media back.
Now, I’m talking about stereotypes and caricatures and how they endanger people, and I think about what’s happened in Springfield, Ohio. You have this community, a rust belt town, that was going under and they tried a new experiment: They brought in tens of thousands of Haitians, legally brought into the United States, and they settled there to try to revive this town, these people of goodwill, who are hardworking. And in a moment, their lives are threatened because, first you have JD Vance, the Republican Vice Presidential Candidate, and then you have former-President Trump himself, the Republican Presidential Candidate, saying that Haitian immigrants in Springfield eat dogs and cats.
What are they talking about? I mean, if this was just ridiculous, weird lies, it would be challenging, but these are lies that can take lives. You have the town hall evacuated, elementary schools closed. The College in Springfield is going online for this next week because of the danger Haitians are facing from the Republicans raising this absolutely false…this horror. We need a media that is honest, that tells the truth, and not only talks about people you know.
Tomorrow on Democracy Now!, a little sneak preview, we’re going to bring you the voice of Ahmed Iraqi, who is a Palestinian journalist talking about what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank, where tens of thousands of Palestinians have died. The number could be so much higher. We understand it’s more than 41,000 at this point. We just recently had the consumer activist, four time presidential candidate, Ralph Nader on amplifying the findings of the Lancet medical journal, saying, in fact, the death toll could be reaching into the hundreds of thousands. Not only those directly killed now, but those who will die of disease and the horrific conditions that the people in this decimated, occupied area are facing.
I mean, how important it is to hear the voices of people on the ground.
If you ask most people if they’ve ever heard or watched a Palestinian on television, it is incredibly rare. It seems that the Israeli Prime Minister is getting his way in silencing their voices by first saying no international media can report from there, and then barring Al Jazeera, in particular, from reporting anywhere in the occupied territories. No international media. That doesn’t mean we can’t get voices on the ground from Gaza. Think about the corporate media has so much, almost unlimited resources. Why is it that Democracy Now!, this scrappy show, which is 1,500 television and radio stations around the world, this grassroots, global, independent, international, investigative News Hour can be going to Gaza so much and speaking with Palestinian journalists? Why aren’t the networks doing the same, or with Palestinians simply on the ground, those who have survived. Why are the corporate networks allowing the state to determine whether they hear voices from the grassroots there?
I really do think, and polls show this, that a very significant percentage of people in the United States deeply care about this issue. Republicans and Democrats should take note about US policy. When it comes to Israel, Palestine, it also goes to the international standing of the United States. There is a basic law in American jurisprudence. There’s a basic rule that it’s not only a person who shoots someone else that can be charged with murder. It’s the person who provides the weapon that enables that person to murder someone that can be charged with felony murder. The US, what they’re doing now in Gaza, what they’re allowing Israel to do in Gaza, what they’re allowing them to do in the West Bank…If the US were just telling this other country you shouldn’t be doing this, just on moral grounds…but the idea that they are providing the weapons that allow this to happen.
It may not be popular to question this, though, I think increasingly in this country, people just care about human rights. Young people deeply care. I mean, 1,000 black ministers wrote to the Biden administration and said they’ve never seen more interest in an issue than the African American congregations back in the civil rights era, until they’ve seen their concern and their identification with the people of Gaza and the West Bank.
And I think it’s critical we have a media that opens up. We have to break the sound barrier, whether it’s around the issue of Israel-Gaza, whether it’s the vilifying of full populations like the Haitian population in the United States, the vilification is even broader than Haitian immigrants, of all immigrants. This is a nation of immigrants. We mostly all, unless we’re Native American, come from somewhere, either forced to come here, as with enslaved people, or forced through persecution, as with my family, to leave Eastern Europe and come to the United States. That is something we have celebrated, and we can’t stop celebrating the openness of this country. So Democracy Now! brings you the voices of immigrants. We bring you the voices of people on the ground, wherever they might be.
I see the media as a huge kitchen table, that stretches across the globe, where we all sit around and debate and discuss the most important issues of the day: war and peace, life and death. Anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.
It is such a critical time right now. It is so important that people all over our country have accurate information…about the direction of this country. Our country matters. It is the most powerful country on earth. What we do here is watched all over the globe.
A few years ago, we were doing Democracy Now!, and I interviewed a woman from Guyana. On the subject of Guyana, she was speaking for herself. And then we go to our music break so we can switch guests, and I said, “Next up, we’ll be talking about the US elections.” And we went to music, and I said to her, “Okay, we’re going to bring a new guest, and thanks so much for joining us.” She said, “Oh no, I’m going to stay here for this conversation. I’ll be a part of it.” And I said, “Oh, but we’re talking not about Guyana elections. We’re talking about the US election.” She said, “I understand that, and I want to be a participant because I believe everyone in the world should get to vote for President of the United States.”
And the reason she said that is because what we do in the United States, as the most powerful country on Earth, matters. It affects people all over the world, and we have to decide how we want that power wielded. As a media organization, at Democracy Now! we feel we have to show you all the horror, the glory, the hope, the failures of what’s happening on the ground in our country and around the world.
I wanted to end by saying, there is a whole debate in journalism whether you should show the video of people who are suffering, people who’ve been killed, the images of horror, because people become numb to them. We just came out of August, which was the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. It was also the anniversary of the birthday of Emmett Till and I want to end by going back to 1955 to that horrific day when this young, black, American boy—he was 14 years old—was sent to Mississippi by his mom. She wanted him to get out of the city, out of Chicago, for the summer, and he was with his aunt and uncle and his cousins. And you all know what happened to Emmett Till, I’m sure. He was ripped out of bed late at night. He was tortured, and he ended up in the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. A white mob went after him; they said he whistled at a white woman in a store. When his body was dredged up and sent back to Chicago for the funeral his remarkable mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, said she wanted the world to see and that she wanted the casket opened. She wanted the world to see the ravages of racism, the brutality of bigotry, and so thousands passed by Emmett’s casket and saw his brutalized, tortured, distended face. Jet magazine and other black publications took photographs, and they did publish them. Mamie Till-Mobley had something very important to teach the press of today. Show the pictures. Show the images. Go to where the silence is, because people are good, and when they learn something has happened that they don’t want done in their name, they will speak out. But it’s our responsibility in the media to show those pictures.
Could you imagine it? If for just one week, we saw the images on the ground of the child in Gaza, the little girl wearing pink roller skates who was blown up, the grandfather hiding the mother who was trying to take her daughter to get a polio vaccine. Afraid to go outside. And for just one week, we saw those images. The people in this country would say, “No, war is not the answer to conflict in the 21st century.” Democracy Now!
Thank you so much.