Goodman, Amy

Amy Goodman, (born April 13, 1957, Bay Shore, New York, U.S.), American journalist, columnist, and author, best known as the cofounder and host of Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report, a liberal-progressive daily news program produced in New York City. It is syndicated on radio and television in the United States and broadcast on the Internet.

Goodman grew up on Long Island, New York, and graduated from Harvard University in 1984 with a degree in anthropology. For the next decade, she worked as a producer and news director at the New York outlet of Pacifica Radio, a noncommercial, listener-funded network with a liberal-progressive political orientation.

In 1996 Goodman cofounded Democracy Now! as an alternative to what she and others perceived as an insular and ineffective mainstream press that was beholden to corporate sponsors. Goodman anchored the Democracy Now! daily one-hour broadcast and was also the program’s executive producer. Under her leadership, the show became the fastest growing independent news source in the United States, boasting syndication on more than 750 radio and television stations by the first decade of the 21st century.

Goodman’s investigative journalism in East Timor and Nigeria earned her the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, an award often referred to as an alternative Nobel Prize, marking the first time a journalist had been so honoured. However, her work also occasionally led to legal difficulties. Notably, in 2016 her coverage of protests against construction of a pipeline in North Dakota led to a criminal trespass charge, after state prosecutors claimed that she “was not acting as a journalist.” The trespass charge was soon dropped, but Goodman then was accused of rioting. The case was dismissed by a judge.

She coauthored the best-selling books The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (2004); Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back (2006); Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008); and Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America (2016).