( Condensed excerpts from interview of award winning American journalist , Amy Goodman , of Democracy Now !, whose reports have a massive audience , including through NationofChange - progressive journalism for positive action . )
I think the media can
be the greatest force for peace on earth, because it is a
forum for people to speak for themselves, and when you hear someone speaking
from their own experience, it breaks down barriers – bigotry, stereotypes,
caricatures – that fuel hate groups. That’s why we have to keep the media open.
Instead, the media so often is wielded
as a weapon of war, especially in times
of war you see the media circling the wagons, for example, around the White
House, when it has to really be very much the opposite.
That’s the time of the
most serious questioning, and the time the media has to provide a forum for
everyone
to speak on all sides, not just amplifying the words of those in
power, because so often they don’t represent the majority point of view.
I
really do believe that those who are
concerned about war and peace, those who
are concerned about inequality, those who are concerned about climate change,
are not
a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority
– silenced by the corporate media, which is why we have to take the
media
back.
BUILDING A NEW MEDIA
We have to build our own media. Democracy Now! began as the only daily election show in public broadcasting in 1996, that was the second election of Clinton, and part of our mission was to build independent media all over the country. When we talk about war we’ve got to be independent, not brought to you by weapons manufacturers like Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. When we talk about climate change it’s critical that we are not influenced or brought to the listeners, viewers, readers, by the oil, the gas, the coal, the nuclear companies. When we take on the issue of healthcare, such a critical issue in this country, we’re not brought to you by the insurance companies, by the drug companies, but brought to our audience by listeners and viewers.
When
we started Democracy
Now! we didn’t have the money to use satellites the way the networks do. We
started in radio in 1996,
on a few community radio stations, and then the week
of September 11, 2001 we started broadcasting on one public access station
in
New York – TV station as well as the radio stations – and then the show just
took off and public access stations around the country started saying “Can we
run the show?” and now we’re on over 1100 stations around the world, and we’re
translated into Spanish
as well. I think this is just a testament to the fact
that there’s a hunger for independent voices that gets filtered out in the
corporate media. You get this small circle of pundits on all of the networks
that sort of rotate around, that know so little about so much, explaining the
world to us and getting it so wrong. It’s our job
to dig deep, to drill into a
story, to get closest
to a story with the people who are most directly
affected, and that is why I see Democracy
Now! as news with a heart.
We
originally came out of Pacifica Radio before we went on television. The history
of Pacifica is very important. It started in 1949, founded by a group of people
led by a man named Lew Hill who was a war resister. When he came out of the
detention camps after World War 11 he said there’s got to be a media outlet
that’s not run by corporations. And
so Pacifica was born. The first Pacifica
station was KPFA in Berkeley, not run by corporations.
It was George Gerbner,
the former dean
of the Annenberg School for Communication
at the University of
Pennsylvania, who said, “Not run by corporations who have nothing
to tell and
everything to sell that are raising our children today.”
And
so the first station was KPFA, in 1949, then KPFK in Los Angeles in 1959, WBAI
in 1960, WPFW in Washington in 1977, and KPFT in Houston 1970 – the only radio
station in the country to be blown up. It went on the air in the spring of 1970
and within a few weeks the Ku Klux Klan strapped dynamite to the base of its
transmitter and blew it to smithereens. And when they got back on their feet and
went back on the air it was right in the middle of Arlo Guthrie singing Alice’s
Restaurant that it was blown up again. And I don’t know if it was the Grand
Dragon or the Exalted Cyclops because I often confuse those titles… but he
understood how dangerous Pacifica is. Dangerous because it allows people to
speak for themselves – and there’s nothing more powerful than that.
EAST TIMOR HORROR
East Timor is a story of horror but also of hope. In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor by land, by air, and by sea. Indonesia is the fourth largest military in the world. It was armed, trained, and financed by the United States. It was December 7, 1975, and the day before Henry Kissinger and President Ford, at the time, met with Suharto, the long-reigning dictator in Jakarta, and gave the go-ahead for the invasion. Ninety per cent of the weapons used were from the United States. So we’re intimately connected to this invasion which happened in ’75 and for the next quarter of a century the Indonesian military slaughtered the people of Timor – one of the great genocides of the late 20th Century.
EAST TIMOR HORROR
East Timor is a story of horror but also of hope. In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor by land, by air, and by sea. Indonesia is the fourth largest military in the world. It was armed, trained, and financed by the United States. It was December 7, 1975, and the day before Henry Kissinger and President Ford, at the time, met with Suharto, the long-reigning dictator in Jakarta, and gave the go-ahead for the invasion. Ninety per cent of the weapons used were from the United States. So we’re intimately connected to this invasion which happened in ’75 and for the next quarter of a century the Indonesian military slaughtered the people of Timor – one of the great genocides of the late 20th Century.
I
went there with my colleague, a great journalist named Allan Nairn in 1990 and
1991, and in 1991 for the first time word was going to get out about the human
rights abuses. The Indonesians closed East Timor to the outside world, and they
killed over a third
of the population. We got there in late October, went to
the main Catholic church in Dili, the capital of Timor, which is about 300 miles
from Australia, and we learned that the Indonesian military had shot into the
church the night before and killed a young man named Sebastião Gomes. The next
day his funeral was held and a thousand people turned out for the funeral and
marched through the streets. Nothing like that was seen in East Timor before.
And we learned that this human rights delegation was going to be coming from the
United Nations to investigate the human rights situation, which is why we were
there to see what would happen if people spoke out and spoke to the UN
representatives. For two weeks we went around the country. We then learned that
the UN delegation was not going to come.
DILI MASSACRE On November 12, 1991, two weeks later, the people decided to hold a commemoration procession for Sebastião Gomes, and after church in the morning they marched from there to the cemetery, retracing the steps of the funeral procession. And when we got to the cemetery the Indonesian military was marching up. There were thousands of people and they couldn’t escape because there were walls on either side of the road and we were asking the people, “Why are you risking your life just coming out?” This was a land where there was no freedom of assembly, no freedom of press, no freedom of speech, and yet they were there with their hands up in the V sign shouting “Viva East Timor! Viva independence! Viva Sebastião!” Most people didn’t know Sebastião himself, but they knew that a sanctity of the church had been violated, and the church was the only place people were allowed to gather.
Allan
suggested we walked to the front of the crowd because although we knew they’d
committed many massacres in the past they’d never done it in front of western
journalists.
So we walked to the front and I put my microphone up – we’d
usually hidden our equipment but now we wanted to show exactly who we were – I
put my headphones on, Allan put the camera above his head. Soldiers marched up
10 to 12 abreast and then marched down the road and swept around the corner.
They swept past us, and without any warning, without any hesitation or
provocation, they opened fire
on the crowd gunning people down from right to
left. They grabbed my microphone, shaking it in my face, as if to say, “This is
what we don’t want,” and they beat me to the ground. Allan took a photograph of
them opening fire and then threw himself on top of me to protect me, and they
took their US M16s like baseball bats and battered them against his skull until
they fractured it.
We
were lying on the ground, Allan was covered in blood, and they were killing
everyone around us. They put the guns to our head in firing squad fashion and
they were shouting two things: “Politik! Politik!”
to say we were being
political to watch this, but that’s our job as journalists, to go to where the
silence is. And they were shouting “Australia!” asking if we were Australian,
and we knew how dangerous that was because 17 years before, when Indonesia first
invaded Timor, there were five Australian-based journalists covering the
invasion and they lined them up against
a house and executed them all. We
shouted back
“No, we’re from America, America!” And eventually they took the
guns from our heads, we believe because we were from the same country their
weapons were from, they
would have to pay a price for killing us that they
would never have to pay for killing the Timorese, and they moved on.
We
were able to get into a Red Cross jeep that had pulled up, then dozens of
Timorese jumped on top of the jeep and we drove like that
as a human mass to
the hospital. We
went off into hiding at the Bishop’s
residence, Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, who
went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and thousands of Timorese were there
taking refuge.
We decided to get on a plane, the only plane out, because we
clearly couldn’t stop the killing. They had killed more than 250 Timorese who
had gathered at the cemetery, and we heard gunshots all over Dili, so we knew
the only way to stop this was if we could get out and report to the world what
had happened – it would have to be outside pressure, it wasn’t going to come
from within. So we raced to the airport, got
on the last plane, made our way
from East Timor to West Timor, which was a part
of Indonesia, to Bali and then
we flew
to Guam. There, they operated on Allan, and even as he was being
operated on he repeated the story over and over, because scores of news
organizations from around the world were calling into the hospital to talk to
us. And then we were able to fly to the United States, hold the news conference
at the National Press Club
to say that US weapons were used; to talk about the
connection with the US.
Indonesia could never have carried out this devastating occupation if it wasn’t completely
supported by the United States, and that was a horrific moment for the Timorese,
for Americans, for all of us, this massacre, because unfortunately it was done
in the name of the people of the United States without them even knowing it. It
made it very clear
to me how important it was as journalists to be where the
silence is, to go to where the silence
is, to understand the effect of US
foreign policy.
That was horrific for everyone. The bravest are the Timorese, because they can’t leave, we could leave. It was personally horrifying and devastating to have experienced and witnessed this, and to know that this wasn’t one of the larger massacres. But we have a special privilege as American journalists that protects us, not always, but certainly more than people think at, as Allan Nairn always said, “the target end of the gun.” And this is why the embedding process in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is so problematic. When you’re at the trigger end of the gun, you’re sleeping with the troops, you’re eating with the troops, your life is in their hands, you get a certain perspective. It is absolutely critical for journalists to be at the target end to understand. I really do think if Americans knew, they would stop this. Americans are a compassionate people, and it’s up to the media, it’s up to us to use our privilege as journalists to reflect back what is happening in other parts of the world.
