Amy Goodman, Host and co-founder of progressive news program “Democracy Now!” is an American broadcast journalist, author, investigative reporter, and syndicated columnist. Goodman’s doctrine for journalism, which she cites often in interviews and speeches, is “to go to where the silence is.”
Goodman was raised in New York and studied at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine for a year before graduating in 1984 from Radcliffe College of Harvard University with a degree in anthropology. After that, she worked as Producer and News Director at the New York outlet of Pacifica Radio, a noncommercial, donor-supported network with a liberal-progressive political slant.
She received recognition for her documentation of the 1991 East Timor independence movement, where she and another journalist were beaten after witnessing a mass slaying of Timorese demonstrators:
Then, in 1998, she and fellow journalist Jeremy Scahill covered the Chevron Corporation’s role in a dispute the Nigerian army had with villagers who had confiscated oil rigs and other equipment belonging to oil corporations. Villagers and protesters were killed during the conflict. Goodman’s documentary about the standoff, “Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship,” won the George Polk Award in 1998.
“Democracy Now!” has been on the air, on both radio and TV, and online for more than 25 years. “I see the media as a huge kitchen table that stretches across the globe, that we all sit around and debate and discuss the most important issues of the day,” she told Harvard Magazine last year. “War and peace, life and death. Anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.”
In 2008, she earned the Right Livelihood Award for her work in East Timor and Nigeria. She has also been recognized with the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage, and in 2019, the Frederick Douglass 200 Award. She has authored six books, including The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, released in 2012, and 2016’s Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America.