Lady on the Left

Amy Goodman breaks down barriers

By Jack Goodstein · Wednesday, November 18, 2009

There are the ladies on the right: Laura Ingraham, Anne Coulter. Then there are the ladies on the left: Rachel Maddow, Laura Flanders. Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Network’s Democracy Now!, is just about as left as they come; she’s the kind of liberal Rush Limbaugh loves to hate.

Breaking the Sound Barrier, Goodman’s latest book, is a collection of her weekly syndicated columns for King Features from 2006 to 2009. She speaks out on nearly all of the hot button issues of the period—the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, immigration, illegal wiretapping.

Columns are organized by topical sections—war, health care, media, etc.—and within each section they follow chronologically. You name it, if it was in the news, she has something to say about it. And, more often than not, it expresses a point of view and focuses on information you are not likely to find in the mainstream media. 

“It is,” she says, “the responsibility of journalists to go where the silence is, to seek out news and people who are ignored, to accurately and clearly report on the issues—issues that the corporate, for-profit media often distort, if they cover them at all.” If this is her mission, she does it well. Whether she is making a case for why minor candidates should be included in the presidential debates or criticizing the American Psychological Association for its failure to demand that its members take no part in the government’s torture programs, she expresses a point of view not often heard on the major networks or in the pages of News Corp’s various organs.

Where else are you going to hear about Tim De Christopher, an economics student at the University of Utah who bid on the gas and mineral rights at a federal land auction as an act of civil disobedience? Where else would you learn about the distraught father of a marine who accidentally set himself on fire when he was told about the death of his son in Iraq? Where else would you find out that Donald Rumsfeld was living in Mount Misery, an estate formerly used to torture recalcitrant slaves?

The problem with a book like this, however, is that too much of it seems like old news. Many of the battles she is fighting seem to be over. True, many of the problems she calls attention to are endemic to the political system as we know it, but the specifics have changed.

The torture debate, for example, is something that has never been resolved. Some, like Ms. Goodman, feel that those who authorized it should be tried and punished. Others feel that the fact that we continue to ignore it is a blot on our national honor. On the other hand, I’m not sure that republishing the arguments presented a year ago that didn’t seem to do the job is the best way to get it done.

I find very little to disagree with in Breaking the Sound Barrier. I might quibble about her attitude toward Israel. I might find her analysis of Ralph Nader’s effect on the election of Bush questionable. I might object to her misgivings about the current president. On the whole, however, I find that much of what she says needed to be said, and I commend her for saying it.

She is at her best when she is dealing with the individual story, whether it is that of Major General Batiste, who loses his job on CBS as a military analyst when he speaks out against the Bush war strategy, or the presentation of the rendition and torture of Mohamed Bashmilah. She is at her best defending the underdog, the voiceless.

Goodman is at her best when she runs to the aid of her colleagues who are being manhandled by the police and arrested at the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minnesota. She is at her best when standing up to the powerful with the courage of her convictions.

This article was previously published in http://www.blogcritics.org