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Listening to Democracy Now
by Thomas Boothe and Danielle Follett
A small group of activists in the rural northeastern corner of Tennessee in the United States persuaded their local public radio station, WETS, to start broadcasting the progressive news-hour Democracy Now two years ago.
This pocket of Appalachia would seem to be unwelcoming territory for such an endeavour, since the economically depressed farming and mining region votes overwhelmingly Republican -- by as much as 75% in the last presidential election -- and is, according to Joseph Fitsanakis, organiser of Democracy Now Tri-Cities (DNTC), “the kind of place where 30 years ago you couldn’t really do anything politically unless you were a Klan member.”
[Republished at PFP with express Agence Global permission.]
The radio news show Democracy Now has survived and flourished on
a cobbled-together broadcast network that now reaches all of the United
States and beyond. Listeners are drawn to the broadcasts that daily
defy corporate and government agendas -- and US presidents.
And there was an immediate response; some donors to the mostly
listener-supported radio station, which is a partnership between East
Tennessee State University and the listeners, warned that continued
donations would depend on Democracy Now being taken off the air. It
could have been much worse; Fitsanakis points out that in this part of
the country, political activism has sometimes been met with personal
attacks including bullets through windows and dog poisonings. “People
that got involved in organising mining, the unionists, have a lot of
that kind of story to tell you."
One of DNTC’s main
objectives is to have a network of vocal supporters in place in case a
campaign is launched against the programme. But Democracy Now seems to
have a good chance of surviving on its own merits. Despite the early
objectors, overall reaction has been, according to WETS director Wayne
Winkler, “most gratifying… The positive response has far outweighed the
negative.”
Although there has been some backlash against the programme,
“we lost track of the numbers of people calling in to say they became
first-time contributors because of Democracy Now”. It is now one of the
most successful fundraisers for the station.
Thanks to such
grassroots organisations, the broadcast reach of Democracy Now’s “War
and Peace Report” has been expanding in the United States at a
remarkable rate: An average of two radio or television stations now add
the show to their line-up each week. Its informal network combines
university, listener-supported National Public Radio (NPR) and low
power radio stations; with satellite and public-access cable television
stations; as well as the internet, where it is offered in video, audio
and text format.
When the show began broadcasting out of New York 12
years ago, it was aired on about 30 stations; today that is approaching
700. Some of the programme is translated into Spanish and aired on 150
stations, mostly in Latin America.
This rapid growth is a
testament to a widespread desire for the critical journalism and
extended, banter-free discussion that characterises its broadcasts.
Like mainstream morning or evening news programmes, the show can be
relied upon for a summary of the day’s events. But unlike them,
Democracy Now takes a critical stance toward its subjects,
interrogating the policies and statements of those in power, regardless
of party affiliation. Amy Goodman, the executive producer and primary
host, is fond of quoting a comment by reporter I.F. Stone to a group of
journalism students: “If you’re going to remember two words, remember
these: Governments lie.”
The heterogeneity and financial
autonomy of the outlets offers the world a model of broad-based and
independent media networking. Bill Moyers, perhaps the only critical
journalist on US broadcast television, recently praised the programme’s
“network that is not an institution.” But contrary to many recent
independent media endeavours, it is not merely internet-based. Robert
McChesney, media scholar and founder of the reform organisation Free
Press, argues: “What really distinguishes Democracy Now … has been the
success of their enterprise in the last 10 years, going from being a
programme on a few community stations in the US to having now an
enormous audience on a network they’ve cobbled together.”
Still,
Democracy Now remains at the margins of media because its coverage is
routinely dismissed as partisan, despite being the sole focus of a
not-for-profit organisation that is not affiliated with any political
party or organisation and that receives no financing from advertisers,
corporations or the government. Before moving to rural Tennessee,
Fitsanakis worked with a group in Nashville trying to bring the
programme to the airwaves there. “We organised a huge petition drive,
we got 3,000 to 4,000 signatures… and the station just basically told
us that ‘we don’t care how many signatures you get, this is too
partisan for our area, end of story’.”
The
accusation of partisanship is best understood in the context of the
ongoing consolidation of US media into the hands of a few large
corporations, which spend millions lobbying the five members of the
Federal Communications Commission, upon whom they rely for friendly
regulatory policies. This process intensified in the 1990s with
measures enacted under President Bill Clinton. According to Eric
Klinenberg, professor of sociology at New York University, “the
government did not so much deregulate the market as re-regulate it”,
allowing “big media companies [to] expand and consolidate ownership
across outlets." The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had especially
dramatic effects on radio, allowing a single media company to own eight
or more radio stations in a community.
Given the resulting
streamlining of editorial stances and nationwide reductions in
news-gathering staff, large media corporations have a stake in
maintaining the illusion of the neutrality of their coverage. This
illusion is reinforced when an independent news source is stigmatised
as partisan. McChesney says:
“Democracy Now is as much or more
committed to factual accuracy than the commercial news media. So much
of our political journalism has been so warped to suit the agendas of
those in power, and so uncritical of those agendas. What Democracy Now
does is that it regards everyone in power with tremendous scepticism,
not just Republicans and not just Democrats.”
Goodman has
credited the professional failings caused by the corporate media
climate for her programme’s success. The mainstream media “just mine
this small circle of blowhards who know so little about so much. And
yet, it’s just the basic tenets of good journalism that… you talk to
people who live at the target end of policy." This dereliction of duty,
she believes, has created “a hunger out there for an alternative. It’s
almost explosive.”
Working with modest resources, Democracy
Now does not maintain a staff of story-breaking investigative
journalists or cultivate inside sources. While many among its staff of
25 are experienced journalists, the demands of producing a daily news
broadcast prevent them from full-time reporting. The show’s
effectiveness lies in its choice of guests and its ability to
contextualise events to reflect a different set of priorities.
The pool
of information theoretically available to everyone allows the producers
to choose subjects and approaches that do not get aired elsewhere.
According to Klinenberg, “because there’s so much information online, I
think their editing function really does matter. They select a
different set of stories than typical news organisations select.”
The
10 to 15 minutes of headline briefs are the long day’s work of a single
producer and a laptop. Democracy Now uses wire services, but also
scours international (mostly English-language) online news sources,
blogs and reports from NGOs. Of the 15 or so daily headlines, three or
four will not be found on mainstream broadcast sources. Widely covered
headlines are often presented in a different way.
When President Gerald
Ford died in 2006, the US press eulogised him as the man who, after
Watergate, “healed a nation”. Democracy Now was alone in pointing out
his role in the massacres in East Timor: “Ford gave Indonesian dictator
General Suharto explicit approval to launch the invasion.”
Interviews
are conducted without trivial banter, and unlike most news programmes,
guests are invited to speak at length. Interviewees range from
investigative reporters to non-celebrities at the target end of policy,
to public officials, activists, politically engaged artists and
representatives of NGOs, who are rarely, if ever, invited onto
mainstream shows, including Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales, Noam Chomsky,
Naomi Klein, Ralph Nader, Robert Fisk, Edward Said, Arundhati Roy, and
Cuban National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcón.
While it is the
intention to bring marginalised voices to the airwaves, the aim is not
to establish a leftwing echo-chamber. Representatives of the government
agency or corporation under discussion are invited, although they often
decline. Recent participants have included former Federal Reserve
chairman Alan Greenspan and the president of a trade association for
private mercenary companies.
One uninvited guest was
then-President Bill Clinton, who called into the show on election day
in 2000 as part of an effort to encourage radio listeners to vote for
Democratic candidate Al Gore.
Goodman seized the opportunity and asked:
“You are calling radio stations to tell people to get out and vote.
What do you say to people who feel that the two parties are bought by
corporations and that... their vote doesn’t make a difference?”
From
there, he was quizzed for 30 minutes on issues such as sanctions on
Iraq and Democratic Party members’ support for the death penalty. An
exasperated Clinton finally lashed out at Goodman for asking “hostile
and combative” questions. “They’ve been critical,” she replied.
Goodman
says that the following day a staffer from the White House Press Office
called and berated her for violating the ground rules. “What ground
rules?” she asked. It had been an impromptu call and no rules had been
discussed. Goodman’s transgression was to stray to topics beyond
getting the voters out -- and to keep Clinton on the phone too long.
She told the staffer:
“President Clinton is the most powerful person in
the world, he can hang up if he wants to.” She adds: “I don’t treat
those in power as royalty. They are employees of the people of this
country."
Democracy Now opts out of the role usually taken
by the media during presidential elections. Campaigns count on
mainstream outlets to treat their tactical decisions as breaking news.
When, during the current race for the Democratic Party nomination, the
Hillary Clinton campaign was faced with falling poll numbers, the
decision to have the candidate get aggressive in a debate left the
mainstream press abuzz. Pieces slightly varying the theme “Clinton
comes out swinging” appeared and she was given ample airtime to explain
her new persona. Democracy Now didn’t cover it.
During the
2004 race between George Bush and John Kerry, although the show
provided its audience with regular updates about poll results, its
energies were devoted to larger, systemic problems. Then, as now, it
refused to spend time helping candidates shape their images, focusing
instead on the ostracism of third party candidates, police crackdowns
on election-related protests, and the danger (and ultimately the
reality) of widespread disenfranchisement.
Treatment of campaign issues
was compensatory: most often Democracy Now discussed what was not being
addressed by press and politicians, rather than what was. On 14 October
2004, a story was headlined “Million worker march to address labour
issues ignored by both major candidates.”
By late 2001, many
mainstream news sources were preparing public opinion to accept an
attack on Iraq. When, citing federal officials, these outlets began to
weave in information suggesting that “Bin Laden’s evil pal Saddam” was
behind postal anthrax attacks on press and politicians, Democracy Now
called attention to the fact that “Bush administration officials and
the media have persistently tried to link Iraq either to the September
11 attacks or to the anthrax attacks” and that the FBI was following
leads in other directions.
Closer to the time of the
invasion, when the British press reported that the US government was
tapping the phones of Security Council members at UN headquarters,
Democracy Now was almost alone in reporting this news in the United
States.
It was also unique in its in-depth coverage of domestic
anti-war activities. Audiences of mainstream news programmes were not
told about the occupation of Senator Hillary Clinton’s office following
her vote in favour of the Iraq War Resolution, nor were they privy to
dozens of stories similar to “Man arrested in shopping mall for wearing
a ‘Give Peace a Chance’ T-shirt: over 150 respond by showing up in
similar shirts” (Democracy Now, 6 March 2003).
Democracy
Now’s scrutiny of the official line and use of wider sources gave
listeners a more lucid narrative of what was brewing in Iraq and the
United States. Such a critical approach would perhaps seem a
journalistic obligation, but at the time in the US it was a minority
position. During the war’s first three weeks the six major US
television news programmes did not have a single at-length interview
with an American opposed to the invasion, and with few foreigners or
Iraqis. Democracy Now conducted 30.
It has had occasional
success in influencing corporate news coverage. In March 2004, while
the mainstream press was dismissing the coup in Haiti as a popular
uprising against a corrupt dictator, it pursued the matter further. In
an exclusive interview with exiled Haitian president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, it discovered that the US military had forced his resignation
at gunpoint and kidnapped him. The extensive coverage obliged
mainstream sources to come back to the situation with new questions.
Goodman said: “I call this trickle-up journalism.”
When
Democracy Now interviewed BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast in
February 2007, and aired part of his exposé on vulture funds, showing
the role of the White House in allowing debt relief funding to be used
to pay the exploitative private creditors of developing countries, two
members of Congress brought the issue to President Bush the next day,
pressuring him to address the issue at June’s G8 summit.
Palast later
said: “Until they heard the Democracy Now report -- a lot of members of
Congress listen to this programme -- they had no idea that the money
was being sucked up.”
A huge amount of space to occupy
Because
Democracy Now reaches its audience through such a heterogeneous
network, it is difficult to ascertain the size of the audience, let
alone their political beliefs. “But it’s not the stereotypical version
of the left -- latte-drinking San Franciscans or Bostonians,” McChesney
says. “There are people from diverse branches of society and absolutely
from middle America as well.”
One reason for Democracy Now’s
vigour in Republican-controlled northeastern Tennessee may be that many
on the left and right share an anger over the corporate and government
control of news sources. “The corporate media leaves a huge amount of
space to occupy,” says Goodman.
Elements within the Republican camp are
disillusioned with the Bush government’s lies, scandals, military
failures and profligate spending, and this sentiment often extends to
the media. According to Fitsanakis, a few Republican voters have joined
DNTC because of their concerns over the increasing curtailment of civil
liberties and freedom of speech, a recurring topic on the show.
Three
conservative voters have written to DNTC to support the programme,
saying that although they have trouble digesting elements of the show,
“they are so frustrated with the current government that it’s the only
programme that they can find that has a semi-reasonable, critical
approach to the administration.”
Goodman argues that the
media overplay the differences between right and left. “I think a lot
of concerns are shared,” she said.
“Conservatives are concerned about
corporate control and privacy issues, just like progressives. Military
families are enraged over what has happened to their sons and
daughters, while the children of the powerful do not go off to war.” In
an area like his, where the internet is not a major source of news,
said Fitsanakis, people “turn on the radio and hear a programme that
talks about those concerns that they have.”
Some core
supporters regularly volunteer time to help the show, which inherits
from its parent network, Pacifica Radio, an operational structure that
counts on volunteer labour. When it was created in 1996 by Amy Goodman
and the Pacifica Radio Network to cover midterm elections, it quickly
became a flagship news programme.
But in 1999 there began a two-year
internal power struggle at Pacifica during which Democracy Now was at
risk. Although parties hostile to the show were ultimately forced out,
Goodman and her colleagues decided in 2002 to incorporate as an
independent not-for-profit organisation to safeguard their autonomy.
The two organisations maintain close ties and Democracy Now is still
broadcast over Pacifica’s network.
A coast to coast
broadcast network would be impossible without regular contributions of
money and man-hours from its audience. Democracy Now’s transition to
video was made possible by unpaid workers and, for many years, the
transcripts of the broadcasts on the show’s website were assembled by
volunteers from around the world.
The organisation draws on a database
of 8,000 volunteers, with 1,700 in New York City, who are contacted to
work for a few hours or a day, often handling administrative tasks.
Those outside New York help in outreach, coordinating events such as
Goodman’s regular speaking engagements. Supporters promote the show as
well, distributing flyers and bumper stickers. A West Coast group
raised money to put up a Democracy Now billboard:
“The corporate media
got it wrong on Iraq.
Support the show that got it right.”
Other
volunteers work to ensure that the programme reaches as wide an
audience as possible. In Japan, a group offers a website with
translations of news, while in Phoenix and Buffalo, groups frustrated
with unresponsive management at their public radio stations have raised
money and temporarily bought air time for the show on commercial AM
stations. In Baltimore, a volunteer with access to satellite television
videotapes the show every day, then bicycles it to the local public
access station for broadcasting.
In Massachusetts, where a group failed
to convince the local public radio station to broadcast the programme,
octogenarian Frances Crowe set up a pirate radio transmitter in her
backyard.
“Volunteers will always be with Democracy Now,” said the
organisation’s general manager Karen Ranucci. “Now we’re at a point
where we could still produce a show without volunteers, but we would
never have gotten this far without them.”
In Tennessee, DNTC
takes its activism a step further by trying to build on local support
to mobilise the community. “The way it works,” said Fitsanakis, “is we
just figure that the people who listen to Democracy Now must be the
kind of people we want to approach to begin with. Since the programme
is being heard all across the area, with a potential listenership of a
million people, some of whom are isolated, physically, in mountains and
all kinds of weird terrain, why not use it to bring them together?”
In
its first six months, DNTC recruited 150 members and organised several
events: They rallied hundreds of demonstrators in eight anti-war
protests on the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and
coordinated Earth Day events.
A protest outside a local munitions
factory that manufactures depleted uranium shells was an attempt to
connect with miners’ union activists. But this last action had,
according to Fitsanakis, limited success.
“There were a few unionists
that joined us in picketing, but when it came to our folks, they were a
little timid, a little shy about having to face the police… but there’s
potential there.”
Danielle Follett teaches at
Paris-VIII university and Thomas Boothe is a photographer and film
director; they would like to thank David Ramm for his help in
researching this article.
© 2008 Le Monde diplomatique
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Released: 05 January 2008
Word Count: 3,182
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Released: 05 January 2008
Word Count: 3,182
Rights & Permissions Contact: Agence Global, 1.336.686.9002, rights@agenceglobal.com
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