About the Writers

CURRENT 2009-2010 SEASON

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the principal host of Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now! Her recent book The Exception to the Rulers became a New York Times bestseller. Other books include Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People who Fight Back, and Standing up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times. She has received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the George Polk Award, and the 2008 Right Livelihood Award.

Click here for a sample of Standing up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times

Click here for a sample of The Exception to the Rulers

Links to other texts about Amy Goodman

Speech Transcript

On Dec 8th, 2008, Amy Goodman accepted the 2008 Right Livelihood Award in honor of her work at Democracy NOW! In this speech, she discusses journalism's power and responsibilities.

Upon receiving the award, she said, "we stand with journalists around the world who deeply believe that the mission of a journalist is to go to where the silence is, that the responsibility of a journalist is to give a voice to those who have been forgotten, forsaken, beaten down by the powerful - it's the best reason I know for us to pick up our pens, our microphones and our cameras both into our own communities and out to the wider world. The media can be, must be, a major force for peace..."

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Critical Review

Harriet Malinowitz reviews Amy Goodman's The Exception to the Rulers. Please scroll to the middle of the website to find Malinowitz's review, which she titled "The 'Newspeak' of Our Time."

The interview takes its name from a favorite quote of Goodman's, to which she refers in her conversation with Malinowitz: "I always end every talk as I did at Hampshire [College], saying, 'We have a decision every day--whether we're journalists or students, or teachers, doctors, nurses, artists, activists, employed or unemployed--and that is whether to represent the sword or the shield.'"

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