Democracy Now!

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Democracy Now! is a syndicated program of news, analysis and opinion that, as of 2006, airs on over 500 radio and television stations, on cable TV, and on both satellite television networks in North America. The program's full name is "Democracy Now! the War and Peace Report," and it is the flagship national program of the Pacifica Radio network. It also airs on NPR and community radio stations; public access cable television stations; and both Free Speech TV (channel 9415 on DISH Network) and Link TV (channel 375 on the DirecTV satellite service and channel 9410 on DISH Network) -- as well as over the internet, as both streaming audio and video, and also as a podcast.

1 Founders and background
2 Awards
3 Funding
4 Facilities
5 Staff
6 Notable guests, interviews, and on-air debates
7 See also
8 External links
- 8.1 Articles

[edit] Founders and background

The program was founded in 1996 at WBAI-FM in New York City by journalists Amy Goodman, Larry Bensky, Juan Gonzalez, Salim Muwakkil, and Julie Drizin. Goodman serves as the program's principal host, with Juan Gonzalez often acting as co-host. The program is primarily concerned with issues related to war and peace, human rights, and U.S. foreign and domestic policy. It tells the stories of the people who are affected by policy as much or more as it tells the stories that the policy-makers want told. These stories are generally missing in mainstream news coverage. Goodman's tagline for the program is, "The Exception to the Rulers" -- a phrase which bespeaks both its challenging of the political and economic establishment, and its "outsider" niche among U.S. news media.

[edit] Awards

Democracy Now! and its staff have received dozens of journalism awards, including the George Polk Award for its 1998 radio documentary Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship, on the Chevron Corporation and the deaths of two Nigerian villagers protesting an oil spill. Other awards include the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Prize, and the Pinnacle Award for American Women in Radio & Television.

[edit] Funding

The program is funded by listeners, viewers, and foundations. The Ford Foundation website revealed, for instance, that in 2004 a grant of $150,000 was given by the Ford Foundation to Democracy Now Productions Inc. "to produce, broadcast and distribute a series of radio, television and Internet reports on the media reform movement in the United States." At least $350,000 in grant money has been accepted by Democracy Now! since 2001 from the Lannan Foundation that was set up by the family of former ITT board member J. Peter Lannan. Over $100,000 in grants have also been given to Democracy Now! by former Microsoft VP and Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser's Glaser Progress Foundation in recent years. Glaser was also a major investor in the financially ailing Air America radio network.

Democracy Now! does not accept donations from corporations or any government funding. The staff of the program does not accept grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because they believe that funding from any government entity limits the independence of their programming.

[edit] Facilities

Image:DCTV-DN-firehouse-250x200.jpg

Democracy Now! is headquartered in New York City. Located in a converted firehouse building in Chinatown that is also home to documentary filmmaker Downtown Community Television studio.

The show was previously broadcast from Pacifica Radio's WBAI radio station in New York, and was relocated to the DCTV firehouse during a management conflict at the station, during 2000–2001. Since then, the show has added staff and television capability. With a television signal, the show was able to expand its reach to cable and satellite viewers.

[edit] Staff

Amy Goodman — Host and Executive Producer
Juan Gonzalez — Co-host
Mike Burke — Producer
Sharif Abdel Kouddous — Producer
John Hamilton — Television Producer
Elizabeth Press — Television Producer
Yoruba Richen — Television Producer
Frank Lopez — Television Producer
Jen Utz — Television Producer/Distribution Manager
Isis Phillips — Financial Manager
Neil Shibata — Volunteer Coordinator
Nikki Smirl — Outreach Coordinator
Denis Moynihan — Outreach Director
Mike Kimber — Distribution Associate
Mike "Flip" DiFilippo — Audio Engineer
Nick Marcilio — Engineer
Mike Castleman — Resident Hacker
Dave Rice — Archivist

[edit] Notable guests, interviews, and on-air debates

Tariq Ali and Christopher Hitchens — took opposing sides in two debates over the Iraq War, in December 2003 and October 2004. Ali is a Marxist intellectual, a historian, an editor of The New Left Review, and the author, most recently, of Bush in Babylon. Hitchens, who currently writes for Vanity Fair, is an ex-socialist and former writer for The Nation.
Lori Berenson — Interviewed in 1999 in Peru by Amy Goodman; political activist arrested in 1995 for collaborating with the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, a Peruvian leftist guerrilla organization. It was the first time a journalist was able to interview Berenson inside the prison where she was incarcerated.
Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela — Interviewed by Amy Goodman in September 2005.
Edward Said — was a regular guest; Columbia University professor, literary critic and Palestinian activist and intellectual.
Noam Chomsky — Regular guest; MIT linguistics professor and political activist.
Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States — Interviewed by Amy Goodman on November 8, 2000. Clinton was expecting another in the round of short, easy, election-day interviews that his press office had lined up for him. Instead, he found himself confronted with an interviewer who surprised him with a series of challenging questions that forced him to defend his record on a wide array of issues, in an interview that lasted nearly 30 minutes.
Alan Dershowitz and Norman G. Finkelstein — what started as a debate on the Arab-Israeli conflict quickly turned into accusations by Finkelstein that Dershowitz had fabricated evidence and/or plagiarized his book, The Case for Israel.

Further information: Dershowitz-Finkelstein affair

Robert Fisk — Frequent guest; prominent and controversial British journalist who currently serves as a Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
Bill Moyers — Interviewed by Amy Goodman; former host of the PBS show NOW with Bill Moyers and currently the host of the PBS show Wide Angle.
Greg Palast — Frequent guest; US-born writer and investigative journalist for the BBC and The Observer.
Scott Ritter — Interviewed by Amy Goodman; former UN weapons inspector who disputed the Bush administration's claims about weapons programs in Iraq.
Howard Zinn — Interviewed by Amy Goodman; historian and activist; author of several books, including A People's History of the United States.