AMY GOODMAN
Keynote Speaker
Journalist ~ New York City, New York, U.S.A.
www.democracynow.org
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!. She is co-author of the national best-seller The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them written with her brother David Goodman. The book was chosen by independent bookstores as the #1 political title of the 2004 election season. The book was also chosen as one of the top 50 nonfiction books of 2004 by the editors of Publishers Weekly.
Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 300 stations in North America.Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the U.S., Democracy Now! is broadcast on Pacifica, community, and National Public Radio stations, public access cable television stations, satellite television (on Free Speech TV, channel 9415 of the DISH Network), shortwave radio and the internet.
Democracy Now!'s War and Peace Report provides our audience with access to people and perspectives rarely heard in the U.S.corporate-sponsored media, including independent and international journalists, ordinary people from around the world who are directly affected by U.S. foreign policy, grassroots leaders and peace activists, artists, academics and independent analysts. In addition, the War and Peace Report hosts real debates - debates between people who substantially disagree, such as between the White House or the Pentagon spokespeople on the one hand, and grassroots activists on the other.
Amy Goodman began her career in community radio in 1985 at Pacifica Radio's New York Station, WBAI. She produced WBAI's Evening News for 10 years. In 1990 and 1991, Amy traveled to East Timor to report on the US-backed Indonesian occupation of East Timor. There, she and colleague Allan Nairn witnessed Indonesian soldiers gun down 270 East Timorese. Indonesian soldiers beat Amy and Allan, fracturing Allan's skull. Their documentary, "Massacre: The Story of East Timor" won numerous awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Award, the Armstrong Award, the Radio/Television News Directors Award, as well as awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
In 1996, Amy helped launch Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!. Two years later, Amy and producer Jeremy Scahill went to Nigeria. Their radio documentary "Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship" exposed Chevron's role in the killing of two Nigerian villagers in the Niger Delta, who were protesting yet another oil spill in their community. That documentary won the George Polk Award, the Golden Reel for Best National Documentary from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and a Project Censored award. In 1999, Amy Goodman traveled to Peru to interview American political prisoner Lori Berenson. It was the first time a journalist had ever gotten into the prison to speak to her. In March of 2004, Amy obtained the international broadcast exclusive of the return of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from imposed exile in the Central African Republic to Jamaica, accompanying the Aristides with the delegation that retrieved them.
