Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman, born April 13, 1957, is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. She came of age in a period when community radio, independent reporting, and later the Internet opened new routes for news outside major corporate outlets. Since 1996, she has been the main host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, the independent global news program she co-founded. Broadcast daily and syndicated on radio, television, and the Internet, including transcription, the program became a national platform for reporting on war, peace, protest, and political power.

Goodman was born in Bay Shore, New York, on Long Island, to secular Jewish parents active in social action groups. Her father, George Goodman, was an ophthalmologist; her mother, Dorothy Goodman, was a literature teacher and later a social worker. Her maternal grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi, and her maternal grandmother was born in Rivne, in present-day Ukraine. Goodman graduated from Bay Shore High School in 1975, studied for a year at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, and graduated in 1984 from Radcliffe College of Harvard University with a degree in anthropology.

Before Democracy Now!, Goodman produced the evening news program for WBAI, a Pacifica Radio community station in New York City, for 10 years. Her field reporting brought her into dangerous situations. In 1991, while covering the East Timor independence movement, she and journalist Allan Nairn reported that they were badly beaten by Indonesian soldiers after witnessing the Santa Cruz massacre, a mass killing of East Timorese pro-independence demonstrators during the U.S.-backed Indonesian occupation. Goodman and Nairn later produced the award-winning 1992 radio documentary Massacre: The Story of East Timor, which was later set to video.

Goodman’s best-known work is tied to Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report, which premiered in 1996. The program became a flagship of Pacifica Radio and was described by media critic Robert McChesney as “probably the most significant progressive news institution that has come around in some time.” Goodman’s investigative reporting has included the Santa Cruz massacre, the East Timor independence movement, Chevron Corporation’s assistance to armed forces in Nigeria, the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests and anti-globalization activism, American political prisoner in Peru Lori Berenson, and the U.S.-backed 2004 Haitian coup d’état. In 1998, she and Jeremy Scahill documented Chevron’s role in a confrontation involving the Nigerian Army and villagers at the Parabe oil platform; the resulting documentary, Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship, won the George Polk Award.

Her work has also been marked by confrontation with power. On Election Day 2000, when President Bill Clinton called WBAI for a brief get-out-the-vote message, Goodman and Gonzalo Aburto questioned him for 28 minutes on human rights and policy issues. In 2001, during a conflict within Pacifica Radio, Democracy Now! was temporarily pulled off the air and moved to a converted firehouse, where it broadcast from January 2002 until November 13, 2009, before moving to a studio in Chelsea, Manhattan. Goodman has faced attacks and arrest in the field, including in Dili in 1991, Minnesota in 2008, and North Dakota in 2016.

Goodman is the author of six books, including The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (2012) and Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (2016). Her awards include the Thomas Merton Award in 2004, a Right Livelihood Award in 2008, an Izzy Award in 2009 for special achievement in independent media, the Gandhi Peace Award in 2012, and Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence in 2014. Her public voice lasts because it is direct, fact-centered, and built around a steady question: who is not being heard in the traditional media?