Taking the opportunity presented by the release of the documentary STEAL THIS STORY, PLEASE!, which explores the role and workings of independent media in the United States, Pressenza is publishing the full transcript of the interview conducted by Jon Stewart with Amy Goodman — host and executive producer of Democracy Now! and the subject of the new documentary.
In the interview, Goodman discusses the compromises mainstream media often make by trading truth for access, and reflects on the power ordinary people still possess to organize and fight back, even as attacks on democracy intensify.
AMY GOODMAN: Remember when Newt Gingrich was House Speaker? He would hold a press briefing every day. And he got extremely frustrated with my questions. According to a big piece in The Washington Post, he ended it because of my questions.
JON STEWART: Oh, really?
AMY GOODMAN: But they do capture — this wasn’t at a press briefing, but they do capture the moment I had with Newt Gingrich. It was at the Republican convention. And his mom had just done an interview with Connie Chung where she said that Newt, her son, had called the First Lady a bitch. That was Hillary Clinton. And so I went up to Newt Gingrich — I mean, his words matter. He’s House Speaker. And I said, “Mr. Speaker, will you apologize to American women for calling the First Lady a bitch?” And he said something like, “I never said what you said I said.” And I said, “Are you calling your mother a liar, then?”
[Laughter]
JON STEWART: And that’s when he went, “No, she’s a bitch. She’s not a liar.”
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, god.
Introduction
JON STEWART: Hey, everybody. Welcome to The Weekly Show. My name is Jon Stewart. And it is our weekly get-together. Today is May 5. May the 5th be with you. Yeah, that’s probably not going to work.
Tomorrow will be the day that this comes out. So what is that going to be, May 6? Who knows where we’re going to be? We’re coming apart at the seams, ladies and gentlemen. We’re apparently involved in a ceasefire that involves bombing other countries and them attacking our boats. Nothing has any meaning anymore.
It’s slowly unraveling and slipping away from us, to the point where a literal king has to show up in our Congress and go, “What the fuck is the matter with you people?” Obviously, that is not the tone of voice that he took because he’s a king. I believe what he said was [English accent] “What the fuck is the matter with you?” Something along those lines.
But he had to remind them — remember your whole thing was to defeat us so that you could have freedom and function through the consent of the governed? And we’re slowly unraveling that. And the guardrails that are put in place are nowhere to be found, including the fourth estate.
And that’s why I’m so excited to be talking to somebody who actually has been on the ramparts of that fight for, lo, these past 30 years and does such a public good and a service. And her courage, and bravery, and relentlessness are just wonderful examples to set for the next generation of people who want to come out and tell real stories about what’s really going on in the world. So — Amy Goodman. The fabulous Amy Goodman.
Main Interview
JON STEWART: Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure and honor today to welcome to the program Amy Goodman, who is the Host and Executive Producer of Democracy Now! and has just a fabulous film out that is, I think, a wonderful tribute, but also insight into the incredible work that Amy has done throughout all these years. It’s called Steal This Story, Please! It’s in theaters now across the country. To find a theater, just visit StealThisStory.org. Always dot org. Amy, it’s always dot org with you. It’s not dot com. You’re not a corporate individual. You’re a dot org individual.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s right. And I’m not calm either. But I do want to say —
JON STEWART: Not at all. Not at all.
AMY GOODMAN: But I do want to say that it’s not my film. It’s about Democracy Now! for 30 years, but the directors, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, are a big deal. They’re Oscar-nominated for their film on Hurricane Katrina, Trouble the Water. Tia just won three Emmys for The Janes, which is about the underground abortion network in Chicago in the ’60s. They were Michael Moore’s producers years ago. They did Citizen Coke. So they’re amazing. And they decided to do this film. So to have two Oscar-nominated stalkers in your life — what could be wrong?
JON STEWART: You deserve more. And it’s very interesting, because in that moment I think we’ve established the difference between Amy Goodman and Jon Stewart. I give information, and then Amy gives the correct information. And that, in many ways, sums up the careers.
I have to tell you, Amy, I am a longtime admirer of what you do. Whenever my frustrations over what we consider mainstream news and the criticisms I have, it comes back to — look at Amy Goodman. Look what Amy Goodman does. Why can’t they do that? And it strikes me that it’s because the axis that you work under — and you tell me if this is even mildly accurate — they seem to focus on right-left. You seem to focus on power/no power, voice/no voice. And is that what grounds it and makes the work so essential?
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, that’s what Democracy Now! is all about — to go to where the silence is. And it’s often not silent. I mean, it’s raucous. It’s rowdy. People are organizing. We’re really about covering movements, because movements are what make history. We’re covering the people closest to the story. I mean, we don’t bring you the same pundits that you see on every network show who know so little about so much, explaining the world to us and getting it so wrong. But the people who are at the heart of the story —
JON STEWART: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: As my colleague Nermeen Shaikh says — the co-host of Democracy Now! — in Steal This Story, Please!, the media is this frame. And Democracy Now! widens that frame. Because usually the media really erases so many voices. And we take the people outside the frame, bring them in — and not only bring them in, but we center them.
And, you know, Jon, those people are not a fringe minority. I mean, I really do think those who care about war and peace, those who care about the climate catastrophe, those who care about the immigrant crackdown, about reproductive rights, those who care about inequality are not a fringe minority — not even a silent majority, but the silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media, which is why we have to take it back.
JON STEWART: And it’s incredible how you bring up such an interesting point about there being a prototype or a boilerplate that modern media follows. And I understand television has to be producible, but where we give a bit of information and then the rest of the time is filled out by people who don’t really have firsthand experience or witness experience — your work and Democracy Now!’s work feels like you get the information, not the analysis. So much of media now is just easily produced, shallow analysis. But the information is what’s actually crucial and necessary to expose these stories.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, they took the motto of Democracy Now! — the directors, Steal This Story, Please! — because I consider an exclusive a failure. If no one picks it up, that’s really a problem. We want it to reverberate out, because who are we covering?
I mean, in the film, you have our coverage of the standoff at Standing Rock, where Indigenous people — Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota — were joined by Indigenous people from Latin America, First Nations from Canada, and then many non-Native allies. They thought maybe a couple dozen people would come to help them fight the Dakota Access Pipeline, but thousands came. So we were even late to the story. We were covering it from New York. That’s where we broadcast Democracy Now! from. But we only went out there on Labor Day of 2016.
Now, that is a really important year, because that’s when Trump first ran. Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton. In the presidential debates, not only didn’t the moderators bring up this epic gathering, but they didn’t bring up climate change. And that’s why people were there. They were really scared that the pipeline, which would go under the Missouri River, could bust, could break, and could hurt the water supply of millions downstream.
So we followed one day when they were protesting bulldozers coming onto their sacred burial site — six bulldozers. They stood in front of them, these earth-crushing machines — girls, women, boys, men. And then the machines pulled back. And then the DAPL — Dakota Access Pipeline — security guards released dogs on the protesters. And we filmed a dog with its mouth and nose covered in blood.
JON STEWART: Yeah. Yeah. It was incredible.
AMY GOODMAN: So we released that video online, and within 24 hours there were 14 million views. It really showed — when I go into the networks, when I’m invited in to CNN and MSNBC, which is now MSNow, I would say to the host, “Why don’t you cover climate change more?” And they’d say, “The executives upstairs say that eyes will roll, that they won’t get enough eyeballs.” But this gave the lie — any executive would drool for that number of views.
And then the networks, one after another, picked this story up. President Obama, I think, was in Laos for some historic trip, and he held a democracy forum with students. And one of them said, “Hey, what about that video of the dogs biting the protesters?”
JON STEWART: Wow.
AMY GOODMAN: And I heard that when he came back to Washington, he saw the video. And it wasn’t lost on the first African-American president what it meant to sic dogs on protesters. I mean, steal this story, please — take the story.
JON STEWART: Right. And people don’t see these stories. It really is a tree falls in the forest, and if nobody’s there to hear it, they don’t. But you are wandering the forest recording these trees falling.
There’s a great moment in the film — and I say “great” meaning illustrative, not great in that it was awful — you’re in Indonesia…
AMY GOODMAN: East Timor.
JON STEWART: East Timor. And American weapons are being used by the Army to slaughter protesters. And you’re there. You’re filming it. And I think they said in the film this had been going on for 17 years or something along those lines?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Indonesia invaded East Timor December 7, 1975. 90% of the weapons they used were from the United States. The army was trained, financed, and armed by the United States. And isn’t it amazing that the entire American population — probably most people — never heard of East Timor. And yet we were connected to them by the barrel of a gun.
So I went there to East Timor in November of 1991 with my colleague Allan Nairne, who was writing for the New Yorker. And on this day, November 12, 1991, the people of East Timor were protesting the killing of yet another young person. He had been killed on the steps of a church. Everyone was taking refuge in the Catholic churches of Timor because, for the first time, the UN had sent a delegation that would investigate the human rights situation. So everyone was dropping out of school and work and going into the churches so they’d be protected to speak. But then we later learned, at the behest of the US, the UN delegation didn’t come.
And so on this date, thousands of Timorese came out to the church for communion. The priests held it under the trees because there were so many. And then they marched to the cemetery. And we followed them. And this was unheard of at the time in occupied Timor, when there was no freedom of speech, no freedom of assembly, no freedom of protest — they marched. They marched to the cemetery where so many young people were buried.
And that’s when we saw the Indonesian army, armed with US M16s, marching up. Allan and I always hid our equipment when we were talking to people, because if they were caught talking to journalists, they could be arrested, killed, disappeared. Now, I took out my tape recorder, I slung it over my shoulder, I held up my microphone like a flag. Allan put the camera above his head, and we walked to the front of the crowd. We knew that the Indonesian army had committed many massacres in the past, but never in front of Western journalists. Maybe we could head off this attack.
They marched up 10 to 12 abreast. They came around the corner. People couldn’t escape because there were walls of the cemetery on either side of the road. They marched around the corner, without hesitation, without provocation, without warning, they swept past us and they just opened fire on the crowd, ultimately killing over 270 Timorese on that day.
A group of them surrounded us. They were shouting “Australia, Australia.” They wanted to know if we were from Australia, which is like 200 or 300 miles away. And we understood what that meant. When Indonesia first invaded, there was a group of Australian journalists with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation — ABC — and they lined them up against a house. And they executed them. And the Australian government hardly protested the killing of their journalists, we believe because years later, Indonesia and Australia would divide up the oil spoils in the Timor Gap. So we wanted to make clear we were not from Australia.
And as they beat me to the ground, Allan threw himself on top of me to protect me.
JON STEWART: And they beat him with the guns as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Until — they used them like bats, the US M16s — until they fractured his skull. As we lay there on the ground, they then put the guns to our heads. And we just kept saying “America.” I threw my passport at them. It said United States of America. America, America. Finally, they pulled the guns from our heads, we believe because we were from the same country their weapons were from. They would have to pay a price for killing us that they never had to pay for killing the Timorese. And we understood at that moment —
JON STEWART: Dear god.
AMY GOODMAN: — in order to stop this killing, we had to get out of the country to report it to the outside world, because only outside pressure would stop this. And so we got out.
[Sponsor: Ground News]
JON STEWART: What you do so well is you connect the dots into these areas that Americans are not particularly paying attention to — the nexus of corporate power, and military might, and all these different things.
There’s another — and I hate to walk you through some of the events of the film, but I think it lays out a good foundation for some of the things we’ll talk about later. Again, another example of you on the ground — this is in Nigeria, I believe, and Chevron, which sends helicopters of Nigerian soldiers to shoot people. And you, I don’t know where you get the wherewithal to do it, just go right up to the Nigerian Chevron building and go, “Hey, I’m an American. May I come in?”
AMY GOODMAN: I was so inspired — this was years ago — by this incredible Nigerian writer and activist named Ken Saro-Wiwa. He was Ogoni, from Ogoniland in the Niger Delta. And he threw his lot in with the Nigerian people. And he knew with his prestige, he could go outside the country and tell the world. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country. And Chevron and Shell were operating in the Niger Delta, disempowering so many Nigerians to give power to the rest of the world.
And he came into our studio in New York at WBAI, and I didn’t think we had time. They just said, “He’s here.” And I said, “Oh my god, our show is booked.” And they said, “He’s here for one day.” “OK, two minutes.” And he came on, and he talked about how these large multinational corporations depend on brutal dictatorships in order to suppress the population. And that’s what he described.
And I said, “Well, what about you? Where does this leave you?” And he said, “I am a marked man.” And he went back to Nigeria, and he was ultimately executed with eight other activists. He had been taking on Shell corporation.
But we decided — after Ken was killed — I decided I had to go to investigate the situation in the Niger Delta. And so I looked, along with my colleague Jeremy Scahill, who worked at Democracy Now! at the time — now he founded Drop Site News.
JON STEWART: Did great war reporting as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Yeah. We went to investigate what was happening in the Niger Delta. And we found that Chevron had flown in the Nigerian military. The people in that area described — they said, “We recognized the Chevron helicopters.” The mobile police were called the Kill-and-Go. And they were protesting. The Nigerian military moved in. And they killed two of the young men. They critically wounded a third. And they arrested others.
And so I said, we have to go to Chevron headquarters and ask them about this. And that’s when we went to the headquarters to speak to the chief spokesperson.
JON STEWART: Mind-blowing. They have it on tape. It’s unbelievable in its honesty — its outright directness. He is just forthcoming and direct. “Oh yeah, no — Chevron, yeah, we hired the helicopters. And we sent the military.” The guy just lays it out.
AMY GOODMAN: And I said, “Exactly who authorized it?” He said, “That would be Chevron’s management. Chevron’s management.”
JON STEWART: Right. I mean, it’s a shocking example — and it gets to the broader question. When I think about what my kind of ideal of journalistic integrity or efficacy is, it’s that.
And why is it — you say when you go to these places, into corporate environments or CNN or MSNow or all these different places, they always say to you, “Hey man, I really wish we could do that.” And you’re like, you’re fucking reporters. Not only can you do it, you have more resources than Amy Goodman will ever have. You can do it — you’re on 24 hours a day.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to say, when it comes to — I don’t even call them mainstream, by the way, because I really do think that those who care about all of these issues, from climate change, to corporate power, to war, are mainstream. I think that’s the mainstream.
JON STEWART: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: But I think a lot of good people go into the corporate networks because they think they have a broad platform where they can report important issues. But they are the first ones now — and we just celebrated 30 years of Democracy Now! — but early on, they would say, “Give us a break.” Now, those very same reporters who may not be working for the networks or, for example, for the Washington Post — Jeff Bezos’ paper — who just laid off a third of the newsroom, hundreds of reporters — they’re saying, “You can’t say this loud enough.”
And I just want to say, we had this 30th anniversary, and oh, my god, Jon, I wish you were there.
JON STEWART: You know I don’t leave the house, right? You know I don’t leave the house, Amy. I just want to point that out. I would have gone.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re just like a hologram. You don’t really exist.
JON STEWART: That’s pretty true.
[Laughter]
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we were at Riverside Church — this historic place where Dr. King gave his speech April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis — the speech against the Vietnam War. And at the time, the corporate media — I have the Life Magazine issue that castigated him. He said, “The United States is the greatest purveyor of violence on Earth.” And they said he did a disservice to his cause, his country, his people. They said his speech read like a script out of Radio Hanoi. And he just doubled down, because he connected militarism, racism, and materialism. And he just kept at it.
So we went to this church, 2,000 people packed in. We actually had it for February 23, but then there was that one day of Snowmageddon.
JON STEWART: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And we had to cancel it — 2,000 people.
JON STEWART: So one thing that can stop Amy Goodman is 18 inches of snow. Can’t get uptown.
AMY GOODMAN: It was the fear that someone would slip who came to see us. So March 23 — oh, Juan Gonzalez flew in from Chicago. We’ve done Democracy Now! together for 30 years — the great journalist who used to be at The Daily News. He had that DN, and then he had this DN, Democracy Now!
JON STEWART: He did some great 9/11 stuff, Juan Gonzalez.
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, you know, Jon. You know because of the great —
JON STEWART: Juan Gonzalez is — but he was spectacular, and doing it for a paper that was like, hey, I think this might get us in trouble.
AMY GOODMAN: At first he was on the front page talking about the benzene, the chemicals. And you were the first one to know about it.
JON STEWART: All the shit that was in the air. That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: Then he slowly was moved to behind the refrigerator ads. His editor was fired.
JON STEWART: Oh, wow.
AMY GOODMAN: But still, he kept at it. And Juan’s done such great work right back to — he was one of the founders of the Young Lords, like the equivalent of the Puerto Rican Black Panthers.
JON STEWART: Oh, wow.
AMY GOODMAN: And in New York City, he talked about — and he said in the film, Steal This Story, Please! — how they understood very quickly they have to frame their own narrative. They had hijacked ambulances and tuberculosis testing trucks to come up to Spanish Harlem and places where they were really needed. But they had to tell their story. And the network newscasters on ABC, NBC, CBS said it is amazing how they make downtown white New York tremble. But what they’re doing — they have such popularity. But they had a newspaper called Palante — “ever forward.” And those Young Lords became some of the leading reporters in New York.
But so Juan flew in, and he talked about the importance of independent media. Then Hurray for the Riff Raff, a great group, sang their song “Palante,” like for the newspaper. And then Michael Stipe of R.E.M. sang. Nermeen Shaikh gave her speech. Patti Smith sang “Peaceable Kingdom.” Angela Davis spoke. Mosab Abu Toha, the great Palestinian poet —
JON STEWART: Such a beautiful man.
AMY GOODMAN: — who won the Pulitzer Prize for his essays in the New Yorker, read his poem “Under the Rubble.” And then I was trying to figure out — how do we end this, 30 years, as we move into the next century of Democracy Now!? I see someone in the audience — the boss — Bruce Springsteen.
JON STEWART: Get the fuck out. Come on.
AMY GOODMAN: And he came up, and he sang “The Streets of Minneapolis.” And then, all together, the musicians sang Patti’s iconic “People Have the Power.” And that’s really the theme of Democracy Now! over the last years. Yes, President Trump — any US president — occupies the most powerful office on Earth. But there is a force more powerful. And it is people everywhere, in the streets, talking around the water cooler, organizing in their workplaces, or being fired or laid off from them. That force, involved with social change — if you build a foundation, you never know when that magic moment comes. But if you build that foundation, you will help to direct the future to make history. And those are the movements we —
JON STEWART: But, Amy, the people have to be armed with information — with the information that the dots have to be connected.
And the one thing that they always say — and it’s such a strange formulation of what journalism should be — they always say, “Well, you’re not a journalist, Amy. You’re an activist.” And I don’t understand how any journalist — and by the way, I think it’s because they think activism is a partisan endeavor. But activism in the service of anti-corruption, or in the service of justice, or in the service of amplification of voices that don’t get to go — is exactly — then what is journalism?
Journalism is not narration. It’s not a security camera in a 7-Eleven that’s just capturing images. What you’ve infused and what Democracy Now! always did so well is you infused the passion and the activism for justice — not partisan. There’s a great scene in the film: Bill Clinton calls in to your program. It’s the election of 2000, was it?
AMY GOODMAN: Yeah.
JON STEWART: And it’s election day. And so Amy gets a chance — Bill Clinton, he’s just calling a bunch of people. It’s Democracy Now!, it’s just another constituency. She lays out some of the best incisive questions, to the point where, like, Bill Clinton — you don’t see him because he’s on the phone, but you can imagine that Clintonesque — the cartoon that Plimpton might draw of Clinton — of just his face getting red, like, “You’re being rude, young lady. Stop asking me these questions.” Like, it’s such a great moment that it absolutely, I think, illuminates what happens when independent activist, anti-corruption media meets power.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, we were just doing our job as journalists, to hold those in power to account. He called in to WBAI, where Democracy Now! is based — he was calling dozens of radio stations to get out the vote. And of course, when they called, it was like minutes before the show started. And they said, “The White House is calling.” And I thought they said the White Horse was calling —
JON STEWART: The tavern.
AMY GOODMAN: — which is this historic tavern in the Village.
JON STEWART: On Hudson. Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Right. Where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death. He lived at the Chelsea Hotel.
JON STEWART: They got a little plaque up right in there, right in his little booth.
AMY GOODMAN: And so they said, “The President would like to speak to you.” I said, “The president of what?” And they said, “The President of the United States.” I said, “Oh my god, the White House, not the White Horse.” But he’s calling? And I thought — even still — I thought this was a fake call. But I did give them the internal number. I said, “Whatever, if he wants to call.” He didn’t call during Democracy Now!, that hour. And so it was election day. We were going out to get coffee because we’d be there all night. Who knew that we’d have to be there for five weeks?
JON STEWART: A whole month.
AMY GOODMAN: Bush v. Gore.
JON STEWART: Right. Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN: But the next show, as we’re walking out, the Nueva Alternativa — the Latino music show — Gonzalez screams, “Amy, get in here. The President of the United States is on the phone,” because he called into the station. So I ran in, and me and Gonzalo did this interview with his producer and my two producers. And journalists wait for their whole lives to speak with the President of the United States. We had all of zero time to prepare for this interview.
And I said, “I understand you’re calling people to get out the vote.” And he said something. And I said, “Well, people are wondering — why should they vote? How does their power compare to corporations’?” And then I asked him about taking the Democratic Party to the right.
JON STEWART: To the right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And he got upset.
JON STEWART: Boy, he didn’t — oh, “You cut the welfare by half and that’s going to — and we’ve got the highest employment.” And he just went — and he really got heated.
AMY GOODMAN: A part you don’t see in the film — I asked him about whether he would be granting clemency to Leonard Peltier, who was a Native American leader who’d been in jail for decades. He said he was weighing it. Well, 25 years later, Biden, in his last minutes in office, released Leonard Peltier. And I just went to the Native American reservation where he is in North Dakota.
But I also asked him about sanctions against Iraq killing so many people. And he got so frustrated. He said, “I find you hostile, combative, or at times disrespectful.” I said, “I’m just asking you critical questions.” I asked about Israel-Palestine. Finally, he said he had to go. And that was fine. And I went into the office, and the White House called me — and not the White Horse, the White House. And they were weighing banning me from the White House.
And I said, “What are you talking about? He called me. I didn’t call him.” And then they said, “We told you he had a few minutes. You kept him on the phone for over half an hour.” I said, “He’s the leader of the free world. He could hang up if he wants to.”
JON STEWART: That’s exactly right. And you know what? And he can also answer a couple of questions.
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JON STEWART: But that second scene where the White House calls you and castigates you is the part that I found so fascinating, because it speaks to the bargain that journalists and news organizations have made with power — that access is only granted conditionally. And those conditions negate the entire power of what good journalism is.
AMY GOODMAN: Right. And I call it the access of evil, right? We all know about the axis of evil.
JON STEWART: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: The access of evil. Trading truth for access is not worth it. The questions you’re going to ask for that access — those softball questions — I mean, you saw a few years after the massacre, I was at the White House questioning Mike McCurry, Clinton’s spokesperson. And it was at a time when, amazingly, for the first time, Congress had cut off military training aid to Indonesia.
I was asking McCurry — he was talking about President Clinton’s 21st wedding anniversary with his bride. The reporters were asking about golf clubs that he used. And so I said, “Is he really going to be restoring military aid to Indonesia?” And he wouldn’t quite answer my question. And when I really pursued it, I said, “Some are saying that it’s like — giving weapons to Saddam Hussein.” And McCurry said, “We don’t see it that way. We see it as serving the national interest,” which is just astonishing. We’re killing a third of the population of East Timor — one of the great genocides of the late 20th century? And when I was pushing that, he said, “The turnip is dry.” And many of the reporters in the room giggled and laughed with him.
And it’s that kind of not only trading truth for access, but it’s a kind of peer pressure. And this is not worth it. I mean, politicians need journalists more than journalists need politicians. Our job is to do our job. It’s not to win a popularity contest. There’s a reason why the freedom of the press is enshrined in the US Constitution in the First Amendment — because ultimately, it’s about the public’s right to know. And we can’t have a meaningful democracy unless people have information.
JON STEWART: But what we have, Amy, is the theater of a democracy. It’s a show. I can’t tell you how often I watch the daily press briefing where they put on a play for the American audience. And Karoline Leavitt, or whoever’s in that position — whether it was Mike McCurry in those days or everything — comes out and lies pretty much the whole time. And the journalists sit there, and they’ve been cast, I guess, as the peanut gallery. And occasionally they’ll get off a good question. But you’re right — they don’t cooperate with each other. They’re all combating each other for a certain access or trying to make their name in this theater of the absurd, as though that press briefing is illumination in any form. It’s not.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, remember when Newt Gingrich was House Speaker? He would hold a press briefing every day. And he got extremely frustrated with my questions. According to a big piece in the Washington Post, he ended it because of my questions.
JON STEWART: Oh, really?
AMY GOODMAN: But they do capture — this wasn’t at a press briefing, but they do capture a moment I had with Newt Gingrich. It was at the Republican convention, and his mom had just done an interview with Connie Chung where she said that Newt, her son, had called the First Lady a bitch. That was Hillary Clinton. And so I went up to Newt Gingrich — I mean, his words matter. He’s House Speaker. And I said, “Mr. Speaker, will you apologize to American women for calling the First Lady a bitch?” And he said something like, “I never said what you said I said.” And I said, “Are you calling your mother a liar, then?”
[Laughter]
JON STEWART: And that’s when he went, “No, she’s a bitch. She’s not a liar.” She’s getting me in trouble.
AMY GOODMAN: But it’s our job to ask the questions.
JON STEWART: But it doesn’t get done. Or it’s scripted. And so it gives you the illusion of information. And I really do think that’s the difference.
And I’m wondering, how does it get captured? Why does it get captured? Because, like you said, a lot of them are really good people. A lot of them are committed. How does it end up as this kabuki theater?
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, I think — and I think you should ask some of them — but I think they know how to rise in the corporate media ladder. And when you start saying, “I want to go cover that protest,” you keep getting sidelined. And you say, “Well, I went to the White House press briefing, but they wouldn’t call on me” — this isn’t good for them. And so instead, you ask a question that will allow you to ask a question the next day. But for us, you just have to be outside.
Look at the Pentagon reporters. They did something interesting. When they were told recently by Secretary Hegseth that they had to sign an oath that they would not release classified information without the Pentagon’s approval — interestingly, across the political spectrum, a lot of them said no. So they were outside the Pentagon then. And then in that case, that’s where they need to be.
A judge just ruled, not once but twice, that that demand is unconstitutional. You have AP refusing to say “Gulf of America.” They say “Gulf of Mexico.” I thought they could compromise. They could say “Gulf of América.”
[Laughter]
JON STEWART: If you say it with the accent, it’s halfway. It’s meeting halfway. Amy, it’s a fine solution.
How do we unravel that symbiotic relationship where Washington is this nexus now of corporate power — it’s kind of a self-propagating machine. Like, as you see, they deregulate, let’s say, tech, and create trillions of dollars of wealth that flow towards these five individuals — the gods that will decide our future — and then those individuals will filter back into the political system tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to keep those people ensconced in power. And the media around it is also feeding out of the same trough.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, they’re owned by the same.
JON STEWART: They’re owned by the same.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve got Washington Post owned by the billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. And what does he do? He pays $40 million for the Melania documentary and apparently another $35 million to push it. But that’s $40 million giving it to Trump.
JON STEWART: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And at the same time, he is slicing the newsroom by hundreds of reporters. I think both are currying favor. And now apparently Amazon is talking about reviving The Apprentice, and it’ll be Donald Trump Jr. who will be the star of that. And they own the press. And that’s why these corporate mergers are such an enormous problem with the Ellisons. You have them owning Paramount Skydance.
JON STEWART: Sure. They just bought us, and now they want to buy CNN.
AMY GOODMAN: The Warner Brothers, Discovery, CNN, HBO.
JON STEWART: CNN, HBO, all those things. But how do you — if there is a media industrial complex, and I think there is, where it’s this revolving door where everybody’s eating out of the same trough — independent media is the answer, yet why doesn’t independent media grow in that same way? Like, what grows is this sort of podcast universe like this, where we’re just analyzing things. But they’re not doing the work that you guys do, which is information gathering.
AMY GOODMAN: We have a model of listener, viewer, reader support. We started, what, 30 years ago on nine Pacifica radio and community stations. We thought we’d end after the election. It was the only daily election show in public broadcasting in ’96. But there was such a demand for it after that we continued. So more and more stations picked us up, some NPR stations as well.
Then 9/11 happened. We were at that firehouse downtown, community television.
JON STEWART: Yes. You were right in the thick of it.
AMY GOODMAN: And one TV station in New York — Manhattan Neighborhood Network, public access — had a link to that community media center. They started broadcasting us as emergency broadcasting. Public access TV stations around the country started asking for the show, then PBS stations, then NPR stations. And now we’re at about 1,500 public radio and television stations around the country and around the world. By the way, public access is also under assault right now.
JON STEWART: But even NPR and PBS backed away from you guys for certain stories, fearing the loss of funding.
AMY GOODMAN: And for us, we had such a strong global supporter base from 30 years ago. You have to understand, we couldn’t afford anything. And the intertubes — it was right around the time of the intertubes coming into being. So democracynow.org — it was before the word “podcast.” And we put up the MP3, and radio stations, that’s how they could take it for free. The other networks could pay to have satellites to put it out. We couldn’t.
But because we put it on at democracynow.org, people would transcribe it immediately. Someone in Mexico, someone in Montana, someone in Michigan — our transcription coordinator put it all together every day. The transcription would be there right away. To this day, most shows don’t put their transcript up.
And then network reporters, interestingly, would take those transcripts to the White House, to the Pentagon, to the State Department. And it would be based on their questions from real people closest to the story, not the know-nothing pundits. And that’s what we call trickle-up journalism. But it grew so fast because we put total information online.
JON STEWART: Do you think it’s your training, Amy, in — there’s a different aesthetic when you’re dealing with radio news. Your background in radio before — because it’s an interesting transition that you guys made from radio, and BAI, and all those things to television. But you never lost — a lot of television focuses on being a visual medium. Unless we have tape — you guys always seem to have remembered your aesthetic from radio. And it’s a different way of telling stories.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re absolutely right. I mean, it’s a more imaginative medium. And so we were on that. Let me just tell the story of Pacifica, which is amazing.
JON STEWART: Please.
AMY GOODMAN: 1949, founded by a war resistor named Lew Hill, who came out of the detention camps. In Berkeley, California, they established KPFA in 1949.
JON STEWART: Oh, I didn’t know that was done literally from someone who had been interned —
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
JON STEWART: — in World War 2?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes. And then KPFK in Los Angeles, 1959, went on the air. My station, WBAI, 1960. WPFW in Washington, 1977. But the fourth station was KPFT in Houston. In the Petro Metro. It goes on the air in the spring of 1970. Within weeks, it’s blown up by the Ku Klux Klan. They strap dynamite to the base of the transmitter. KPFT rebuilds themselves quickly. And in a few weeks, they go back on. And the Klan straps 15 times the dynamite to the base of the transmitter. And right in the middle of Arlo Guthrie singing “Alice’s Restaurant,” which I thought was a good song, they blew it up again.
[Laughter]
JON STEWART: It’s a good song. It’s just very long, and that’s probably what happened.
AMY GOODMAN: So then it takes months for KPFT to rebuild. And in January of 1971, Arlo comes back to Houston to finish his song on the air. And yes, it might have taken a long time. And KPFT is back on their feet. I can’t remember if it was the Grand Dragon or the Exalted Cyclops, because I often confuse their titles —
JON STEWART: It’s very hard to tell them apart sometimes, because you got to look at the hoods. One of them has, like, a Rehnquist hood that has, like, little bars on it or something.
AMY GOODMAN: But he said it was his proudest act. That’s because he understood how dangerous Pacifica is, how dangerous independent media is — dangerous because it allows people to speak for themselves. And when you hear a Palestinian child or an Israeli grandmother, when you hear an Iranian uncle or an aunt in Afghanistan — like, that Iranian uncle might remind you of your uncle. And you might not like your uncle, but it makes you much less likely to want to destroy him. You cannot caricature or stereotype him anymore.
JON STEWART: Humanization.
AMY GOODMAN: And that is what fuels the hate groups. I think the media can be the greatest force for peace on Earth. Instead, all too often it is wielded as a weapon of war, which is why we have to take the media back.
JON STEWART: Yes. And manufacturing consent to create a narrative, because that’s more interesting. I always felt that that was part of what happened in Iraq — there’s a certain thing, within the corporate media environment, that war is more interesting than not war. And it’s a good story. And it’s a build-up. And they almost create the kind of — I’m not saying they create the war, but they do create a kind of lubricant for the war that allows it to — they take some of the friction out of the tube.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, absolutely. In a time of war, the media tends to circle the wagons around the White House. Look at what President Trump said this past weekend. He said, “If you question the war” — I think he said, “If you say that the US is losing the war or not winning the war, that is treason.”
JON STEWART: Hegseth called them the Pharisees. I mean, he went biblical — that if you were to question their decisions, you’re literally against God. Forget about even America.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is such an enormous problem. I mean, when you look at Iraq — what did Iraq have to do with 9/11? Of course not. But there are commonalities from Timor, to Iraq, to Venezuela, to Iran. Three letters — oil. And I’m not saying it’s the only reason, but they understood this with Iraq. Remember? Didn’t they call, originally, the US invasion of Iraq “Operation Iraqi Liberation”?
JON STEWART: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And they realized that the acronym was OIL, so they changed it to “Operation Freedom.” They couldn’t do that. They understood it.
JON STEWART: Even they knew that was too far. Amy, have you ever felt like stories that you had done had been utilized for the wrong purposes? Were there any situations where you felt like you walked into a situation and regretted putting something out there? What are the safeguards that independent media has on things like that?
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, it’s a good question. I think of times if someone has been taken hostage, if someone in different countries — the family — doesn’t want to put out word right away. I may hear about it. And they are terrified that they’ll be killed right away. I, in most cases, would not defy that if someone felt that someone’s life was at stake at that moment.
I mean, it’s just so important to hear people describe their own experience, and if they can’t, to have someone closest to them. I was just thinking about a woman named — at the end of Steal This Story, Please!, I mean, Tia and Carl did an incredible job — they continued to add to the film until now, and now it’s out all over the country.
A woman in Minneapolis — I mean, the people of Minneapolis have taught us so much. That’s people across the political spectrum, because it’s about community.
JON STEWART: And about not capitulating in advance.
AMY GOODMAN: Right. And if an immigrant family is afraid to go out and buy groceries, people would buy groceries for them; afraid to take their kid to school, walk their kid to school.
But I was thinking of Aliya Rahman. She is an autistic disabled woman who is on her way to the doctor. Immigration agents stop her, smash her window as she shouts to them, as they drag her out of the car, cutting her seat belt — “I’m disabled. I’m disabled.” They say, “Too effing late,” except they use the full word, like President Trump does. So they drag her out. They injure her seriously. She’s taken to the Whipple Detention Center. She doesn’t know what’s happened.
When she gets out, we interview her. And then Ilhan Omar, the Congress member from Minneapolis, invites her to the State of the Union address. They can each get a guest. Ilhan Omar — the only Somali refugee Congresswoman — who President Trump calls garbage, he calls the Somali community in Minneapolis garbage.
JON STEWART: He’s denigrated the entire community.
AMY GOODMAN: Oh, my god. So she goes to the State of the Union, Aliya Rahman. She’s a US citizen — and I hate to even qualify this by saying she’s a US citizen, as if, if you’re not a US citizen, you can be dragged out.
JON STEWART: Right. Then you can be treated however they want to treat you.
AMY GOODMAN: So she goes, and she’s in the gallery where all of the guests are. And she’s between some police chief and some mayor of two different towns that others had invited. And she’s there, and she’s sitting. And President Trump’s giving that longest State of the Union speech ever. And the Republicans are standing, applauding, making noise, sitting. And if it was a Democratic president, it would have been the other way — Democrats would have been standing. Up and down, standing, roaring, sitting down, applauding.
And then he starts to denigrate the people of Minneapolis. And she stands up in quiet witness. She just stands there. She has a cane. She stands there. Security takes her out. They take her down — once she’s already injured from Minneapolis.
We had invited her on the next day, not knowing any of this. We wanted to ask, “What’s it like to be there at the State of the Union after this happened to you in Minneapolis?” She is taken to jail. She gets out at 4:00 in the morning. She comes on Democracy Now! and she says, “I am wearing the same clothes that I wore to the State of the Union because I was arrested.” She was taken down. It was like a supervisor had to say to the agents who took her out, “What are you doing?” And she came on Democracy Now!
JON STEWART: And it’s so important, though. Amy, it’s so — and Minneapolis is a great example of that, because what you see is they lie about things that happen. And so if you don’t have witness, if people don’t have the courage, like this woman, to stand up — or the footage, like they had in the case of Renee Good and Alex Pretti — this is what they lie about when we have witnesses and cameras. Imagine what they lie about when we don’t have that.
AMY GOODMAN: Exactly. And so Aliya — they have that video. And then here, because she told her own story on Democracy Now!, the New York Times takes it, Washington Post, the networks take it. That’s the idea of Steal This Story, Please!
[Sponsor: Quince]
JON STEWART: There’s something in the film that I thought was so poignant. You travel back to a place, a town where I believe it was either your grandmother or your great-grandmother was from.
AMY GOODMAN: It was Rivne, Ukraine, where my grandmother was born.
JON STEWART: Rivne, Ukraine. Now, there’s a mass grave there where the Nazis had come in. Your grandmother had gotten out, because of the pogroms, a little bit earlier. And you stand by the stone that they have commemorating this mass slaughter of tens of thousands of people.
AMY GOODMAN: 25,000 Jews.
JON STEWART: Right. And you say a silent — or you sing a prayer, and it’s incredibly moving, about the dehumanization of the Jewish people during that time. And then immediately, you refer it back to Gaza. And I thought that juxtaposing those two things so beautifully encapsulated how this dehumanization continues today, and that these slaughters are not justified wherever they may go. It was that “never again, anywhere.”
AMY GOODMAN: Never again for anyone anywhere.
JON STEWART: Right. But there’s an art to that narration, to remind people that the suffering that you believe your people are going through is also what other people are going through. And you cannot cut their humanity off.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jon, when I grew up in Hebrew school, I was always obsessed with — almost — why would non-Jews help us, help Jews during World War 2? Why would they hide a family in a barn, or in an attic, or help someone? Because they’re putting their own lives at risk. And I was always amazed. They’re called “the righteous.” And I was stunned by what they did and the enormous risk they took.
And you look today at what is happening in Palestine. And I went to cover — at the end of this film, they show the covering of Grand Central. 1,000, mainly Jews, come out on Shabbos, on Friday night. And they shut down Grand Central, saying “never again for anyone, anywhere.” And their T-shirts said, “Jews say no.” And we’re interviewing them. That’s the important thing. I mean, the networks — how far they’ll go — they might show a protest, but go and interview the people.
JON STEWART: They don’t do that. What they’ll do is they’ll use that framing, especially on the cable networks, to frame it as anti-Semitic radicals were there. Meanwhile, you’re on the ground with them, and they’re all Jewish. They’re all like, “What we’re saying is the Netanyahu government and the Zionists who are saying, ‘No, this has all been given to us by God, and that’s what we’re going to do’” — like, that’s what they’re rejecting.
AMY GOODMAN: Right. It’s Fox News. And they were saying the level of Semitism is unconscionable. It shocks the conscience. And they’re showing the same protest. And they’re not contradicted because they don’t talk to anyone.
And then you see this 81-year-old Jewish CUNY professor with her high-waters — like, her pants up above her ankles — saying to the police, “Take me. Take me.” And you see the children of Holocaust survivors who are older women now, saying “never again,” holding up their handcuffed hands. And you see a young, obscure state legislator who’s there, who I interviewed —
JON STEWART: By the name of —
AMY GOODMAN: Zohran Mamdani.
JON STEWART: I believe that’s correct.
AMY GOODMAN: Who says, “I am here in solidarity with the Jewish community.” And I had asked him — this wasn’t included in the film — “Are you getting arrested today?” But he had told me he couldn’t because he had just gotten arrested like a week or two before, and that could lead him to prison. So he was there supporting people. And amazing — think of what has happened with Zohran Mamdani, from that to speaking up right now as mayor of New York City.
JON STEWART: But, Amy, as the cycles continue to repeat themselves — does it cause you — is it disheartening? So much of what you were doing early on as you were drawing that line between corporate power, American money, the violence being done to people in other places, in our names, for our fuel, and all those things. And then you draw the line today — American dollars being used with weapons to kill people that we have no beef with, that have nothing to do with us, for fuel and all these other things.
And look, the show that I do — there’s a certain impotence to it. It can be cathartic, but it’s impotent. And that’s a frustration that I deal with. But I wonder, when you’re doing it in a manner that is really — you’re embedded in it with those voiceless people — I wonder, what does that do to you emotionally?
AMY GOODMAN: First of all, you’re underestimating — to say the least — your own power, because humor means so much. And obviously President Trump pays attention, to say the least.
JON STEWART: A little too much, but yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: After I come off the show every day, I suffer from PTSD — post-traumatic show disorder. It is a lot to take in. But think about what it is for the people, whether we’re talking about Iran —
I mean, I just want to say — when we were talking about Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and gutted the newsroom staff, almost the whole Middle East division — we had on a Washington Post reporter right at that time, a few weeks ago, who did an analysis of the first day of the US-Israeli strike on Iran — in southern Iran, Minab, the girls’ school, the primary girls’ school. She did an analysis. It looks like it was a US Tomahawk missile, hit the school, 175 people dead, about a dozen teachers, and mainly little girls going to school. And this Washington Post reporter was in our studio doing this incredible analysis of it. But she didn’t work for the Washington Post anymore because she had just been laid off.
Now, she still did that. And people now everywhere are still doing things. And the media — I couldn’t have predicted social media, how it rose up over these years.
JON STEWART: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: We always went — we never expected people would come to us. We go to where everyone is, and we put out the news on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok, whatever. And I don’t think we can predict, with the shuttering of newspapers, the gutting of them, the networks consolidating or disappearing — who knows if HBO documentaries, those documentaries like Tia’s The Janes, will still be there if it’s taken over by Trump allies? Who knows? But new entities emerge. And if we can just be a model for what that new entity can be —
In the rest of the world, they know state media. And they know private media. But they don’t know listener, viewer, reader-supported media.
JON STEWART: Independent media.
AMY GOODMAN: And that’s what we want to be a model of. And the hunger for independent voices — I’m traveling the country with the film, doing the Q&As after — and we do fundraisers for either NPR stations, for PBS stations. We just did Howard University’s PBS WHUT, WPFW Pacifica radio, WEAA at Morgan State. These have been amazing.
And in Baltimore, when we got there at the movie theater — it’s called The Charles in Baltimore — big sign, “The Devil Wears Prada.” “Devil Wears Prada 2.” And then over on the side, it said, “Steal This Story, Please!” So as we pulled up — the place was packed to the gills. And I go, “Oh my god. It’s going to be empty. And everyone’s going to the Devil Wears Prada.” So anyway, I go in. And everyone’s saying, “Oh my gosh, we love Democracy Now!” I said, “Really?” So all these folks who are going to the “Devil Wears Prada” — and they go, “What are you talking about? We’re going to Steal This Story.” And then I looked on the screen, and it said, “Steal This Story — sold out,” but they were still selling plenty of tickets to the “Devil Wears Prada.”
JON STEWART: Wow.
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, there is a hunger for independent media. I see the media as a huge kitchen table that stretches across the globe, that we all sit around, and debate, and discuss the most important issues of the day — war and peace, life and death.
JON STEWART: Like how you grew up. It really — in many ways it’s a reflection of —
AMY GOODMAN: The Shabbas table.
JON STEWART: You sitting around with your mom and dad, who sound like incredible people — and your brother.
AMY GOODMAN: They are incredible. Three brothers.
JON STEWART: And practicing — I was thinking of the one who ran David’s Press —
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, David’s Press. He writes books with me. He’s a great journalist in Vermont.
JON STEWART: But it really — it’s grounded in a kind of familial warmth and love of criticism, discussion, openness, honesty.
AMY GOODMAN: And even after we have vicious fights, we still love each other.
JON STEWART: And you’ve taken that aesthetic and infused it into this really incredible media entity.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, yeah, I mean — that is the power of the voices. I mean, I bask in their glow. But just to say, with that image — seeing it as this huge kitchen table where we debate the key issues — anything less than that is a disservice to the service men and women of this country, because they can’t have these public debates on military bases about whether they’re sent to kill or be killed. Anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.
JON STEWART: I couldn’t agree more. And I think the moral foundation of what you do has to be infused into news organizations, whether it’s corporate or not. And I think the people in those organizations have more power than they believe they do.
AMY GOODMAN: I agree.
JON STEWART: And they have to start taking that back. As you look at the future of independent media, and Democracy Now! stands as the linchpin of it and a real guiding force for people and a light — is there a future for it that is benefactor-driven? Is there a Bezos but for independents that carries it through?
AMY GOODMAN: I think it comes out of community.
JON STEWART: It’s always got to come out of community. Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And the support has to come from the community. I mean, because ultimately — look, Bezos buys the Washington Post. No one knew what he would do with it. But during that time, they developed that slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness,” which is true. But look, it’s very dark at the Washington Post.
JON STEWART: I was going to say, and they’re the ones who had the dimmer switch. And they’re the ones that were pulling it.
Amy, I just want to thank you for spending the time with us. I’m such an admirer. And the work that you’ve done over all these years is just legendary. And so we so appreciate you and all the people that are behind the scenes that work so hard — although, I have to say, you do more with less than any organization of your ilk that I have ever seen in my life.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, my colleagues are my inspiration.
JON STEWART: But it’s fantastic. So, Amy Goodman, Host and Executive Producer of Democracy Now! And the movie is Steal This Story, Please! Go to StealThisStory.org, find out where it’s playing, and go check it out, because it’s incredibly moving and incredibly inspiring. And I appreciate you. So thank you for talking to us.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you so much. Hope to see you folks at the movie theater.
JON STEWART: Absolutely.
The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central Podcast, produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.
