We Want the Airwaves: Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman on Who Really Owns the Media

How much of the state of the media–the ownership, the stories that get through and don't get through–– has been a constant across the past hundred or so years of American history, and how much is very specific to our particular moment?

Well, the problems are amplified because the media has become so powerful. Before, in a less globalized world, when a local community read a newspaper, it would have an effect on that community. But once one image, broadcast across the world by, say, MSNBC or CNN, becomes so powerful, it matters that we're viewing the world through a corporate lens. I mean, you had CBS executives during the Gulf War quoting the Wall Street Journal, saying that the coverage of the war had to be more upbeat, leading into commercials, because it would be harder to sell the product. So you are crafting the coverage to the sales pitch.

But there has always been advertising.

Right. But this is on a much larger scale. And now we have a level of media consolidation that you've never seen before.

And what specifically do you think consolidation does to what we're seeing?

It becomes completely homogeneous. And the problem is what we're not seeing. President Bush invoked this executive order, saying you can't videotape, photograph, or film flag-draped coffins coming home. And how rarely do we even see a sick or wounded soldier in this country? They bring them home under the cover of night. And so there's this sense of a war that is sanitized, that is pain-free. Thousands of U.S. soldiers have died, more than ten thousand, and twenty thousand U.S. soldiers have been wounded. It's much easier to deny the number of Iraqis who have died.

Some reports say it's more than 100,000. In this country, we have absolutely no idea.

I read an interview in which you claimed that Democracy Now!'s audience is larger than that of Fox or CNN, which surprised me.

We are cobbling together a network of independent media all over the country and all over the world. We broadcast on Pacifica stations, on NPR stations, on college and community stations, on low-power FM stations. We're on public access TV, we're on PBS stations, we're on both TV satellite networks. And we have video and audio podcasts on the web.

I think we have to answer a corporate globalized world with grassroots globalization. Globalization is an undeniable fact. The question is who's in control of it, and how do we communicate with each other? I think the worst nightmare of these large powers, these large multinational corporations, is that at the grassroots, we're globalizing too.