Goodman, Amy

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Goodman, Amy

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Hyperion Editorial Department, 77 W. 66th St., 11th Fl., New York, NY 10023.

CAREER: Journalist. WBAI (radio station), New York, NY, staff member, 1985–; founder and executive producer of syndicated radio program Democracy Now!, 1996–.

AWARDS, HONORS: With Allan Nairn, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for international reporting, Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award, Armstrong Award, Radio/Television News Directors Award, and awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, all for the documentary Massacre: The Story of East Timor; with Jeremy Scahill, George Polk Award, Golden Reel for best national documentary, and Project Censored Award, all for the documentary Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship.

WRITINGS:

(With Noam Chomsky and Paul Farmer) Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup, Common Courage Press (Monroe, ME), 2004.

(With brother, David Goodman) The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them, Hyperion (New York, NY), 2004.

Writer and producer of documentaries, including, with Allan Nairn, Massacre: The Story of East Timor, and with Jeremy Scahill, Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship.

SIDELIGHTS: Progressive journalist Amy Goodman began reporting the news for Pacifica Radio in 1985, and went on to cover U.S. foreign policy from Mexico, Haiti, and Indonesia. In 1990 and 1991, she and colleague Allan Nairn were beaten after witnessing the execution of 270 East Timorese by Indonesian occupation forces bearing U.S.-made M-16s. Allan suffered a cracked skull, and both stood in a firing line before their captors changed their mind. Their documentary, Massacre: The Story of East Timor, based on this experience, received numerous awards.

Goodman is a founder of Democracy Now!, a radio program for activists and others that airs through regular channels, as well as online, on public access television, and on Free Speech TV. The show ran Goodman's documentary Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, produced with Jeremy Scahill. The documentary exposed Exxon's part in the killing of two Nigerian villagers who protested an oil spill in their community. In 1999 Goodman interviewed political prisoner Lori Berenson in Peru, and she covered the return of exiled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

In an interview for the Women's Review of Books, Harriet Malinowitz asked Goodman about her influences. Goodman replied that her father had been an activist for integration and her mother taught working-class people at a community college so that they could get ahead. She said that she become involved in independent media after writing her college thesis in medical anthropology on the cancer-causing contraceptive Depo Provera. She noted that the corporate media has control of the news and said that her book, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them, written with her brother, David Goodman, "may introduce people to independent media who haven't experienced it, and let them know where it is. I also want to encourage people to challenge the corporate media, because they're using our national treasure—the public airwaves." Speaking of The Exception to the Rulers, Booklist reviewer Brendan Driscoll wrote that "Goodma's vision for media's role in society is as vigorous as her confidence in the power of motivated communities."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 2004, Brendan Driscoll, review of The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them, p. 1419.

Kliatt, September, 2005, Nola Theiss, review of The Exception to the Rulers, p. 37.

Publishers Weekly, March 15, 2004, review of The Exception to the Rulers, p. 64.

Women's Review of Books, September, 2004, Harriet Malinowitz, "The Sword and the Shield: A Conversation with Independent Journalist Amy Goodman" (interview), p. 20.