David Goodman: Making of an activist

It’s April 14, 2008, and a large audience has gathered at the Bagdad Theater in Portland, Ore., to hear authors David and Amy Goodman speak.

Together, the brother and sister team have published three books, each of which has further entrenched them in some of most heated topics of our day.

The latest, “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times,” was released in early April.

Amy Goodman approaches the podium to a raucous round of applause. David has just finished speaking and reading selected passages from their book.

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally broadcast radio and television show “Democracy Now!” and is David Goodman’s older sister.

David is a resident of Waterbury Center, the author of seven books and a regular contributor to the Waterbury Record. Their stop in Portland was part of a national book tour.

“Well, it is such an honor to be here and to follow my brother,” Amy Goodman said. I am often “asked what it is like to be David Goodman’s sister. I think that is a very good question.”

“David,” she says, “inspired me to go into journalism.” She recalls a time in their youth when David was 8 or 9 and began a family newsletter called Dave’s Press.

“There were signs all over our house, pointing up the stairs to his room, Dave’s Press,” she says.

Her brother, she says, soon convinced their parents to buy a copying machine, allowing the young David to reproduce his paper and distribute it to the greater Goodman family.

“He was extremely opinionated,” Amy Goodman recalls. “There was a raging debate in the letters-to-the-editor section of the newspaper about the Vietnam War, and David always stood his ground.

“My grandfather would write and say, ‘David, I am so proud of your newspaper, but your positions on the war are wrong,’ and David would write back, ‘Dear Grandpa, thanks for being the first subscriber to my newspaper, but your views about the war are stupid.’”

David Goodman later recalled those years as particularly political. It was the late ’60s, early ’70s, Goodman said, there was the Vietnam War and Nixon had recently been elected. His family, like most American families of the time, was a microcosm of the greater political fray. He recalled two chatty great-uncles — one a socialist, the other a staunch conservative who, like the old men on the Muppets, were constantly at political odds.

“My overall perspective was shaped by my parents,” Goodman explained. “They were not headline makers, but they were very much concerned and involved.”

Goodman’s father, George Goodman, was a physician on Long Island and a founding member of the Long Island Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. When Goodman was 12, his father headed a local task force for school integration in the area. Their family lived in the working class neighborhoods of Bay Shore, Long Island, on the south shore, and Goodman remembers the extremely heated community debates that gathered at the high school.

“One thousand people packed in and there were police cars and people were shouting and my Dad would try to very even-handedly navigate through some of the emotions that arose,” Goodman said.

In an effort to break the polarization, Goodman’s father would visit the homes of some of the most vocal opponents, out of the public eye, and try to talk to them.

“What I got out of that,” Goodman said, “was that one individual person can, and has to, make a difference.” When Goodman was in the sixth grade, his class was the first in his community to become racially integrated.

Dottie Goodman, Goodman’s mother, was a longtime English teacher at a local community college who later switched careers to become a social worker.

Following his youth, Goodman said there were two specific and disparate experiences that shaped his career as a journalist. The first was at a rather remarkable high school newspaper called the Maroon Echo. Goodman’s brother Steven, his sister Amy and Goodman himself worked on the paper.

The second experience came later as Goodman entered Harvard. He was 18 and had to apply for a position on the school’s newspaper, the Harvard Crimson. He said his first days on the paper left such a bad taste in his mouth that, in a way, it has shaped his feeling about media ever since.

“A soon as I got on the paper, it was the last meeting I ever attended,” Goodman said. “I just walked out the door. I just found it to be a very alien, hyper-competitive environment.

“In hindsight, what I felt then but couldn’t put my finger on (is that) it was really a grooming-ground for the corporate media. The people who were there went on — pretty much direct — to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and those kinds of places.

“I chuckle at how some things never change,” Goodman said. “I walked away from that corporate media scene at age 18 and 30 years later I’m still criticizing the corporate media for its failings.”

Both David and Amy Goodman, on “Democracy Now!” and in all of their books, have been fierce critics of the corporate-owned media. No matter how intensely he and his sister lambaste the Bush administration and abhor what they see as institutional lies and direct effronteries against civil liberties, they both return repeatedly to draw their sights upon the failings of mainstream media sources.

The corporate media “became little more than an extension of the propaganda machine,” Goodman said. “It has really become a disgrace to what an independent media should be, the way it should behave. It should cover those in power, not cover for them.”

In Goodman’s ideal world, he said, with a slight self-effacing laugh, all the media would sound like “Democracy Now!”

“I think all journalist’s are biased,” Goodman said. “They should just be honest about it.”

Despite the decline in newspaper readership, the negative effects of classified-ad Web sites have had on potential revenues, and the overall proliferation of alternative online news sources, Goodman doesn’t see the failings of “the corporate media” as a question of time and resources.

“I think it is a question of whose voice you think is worthy of quoting,” Goodman said. “It doesn’t take any more time or resources to tell the stories from a grassroots perspective. I think it is a question of emphasis. The corporate media defers to authority.”

But journalists are supposed to question authority, not become an extension of it, he said.

“Let it be not just a dialogue, but a trialogue, with a conversation of all sides,” Goodman said. “It is not for the media to decide who should be heard and who should be ignored.

“I see no reason that our leading corporate journalism outlets shouldn’t have all these voices,” Goodman said.

While for many the prospect of Rush Limbaugh and Noam Chomsky as co-anchors of the nightly news may seem a long way off, for now, the likes of David and Amy Goodman and many others are out there, speaking out and telling their sides of the story. For anyone truly interested, they offer accessible alternatives to what is often considered the fast-food convenience of the corporate news.

“Democracy Now!” is broadcast on more than 700 stations, Goodman said, and all of the Goodman books are available online and in bookstores across the country.