DEMOCRACY NOW!

A 20-year chronicle of a radio, TV, and Internet broadcast program whose mission has been to expose, defy, and edify.

In 1996, award-winning journalist Amy Goodman (co-author: The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupation, Resistance, and Hope, 2012, etc.) began hosting Democracy Now!, a radio news hour on public broadcasting focused on the presidential race among Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and Ross Perot. The show was slated to last nine months, ending with the election. Two decades later, it has emerged as an important source of news and analysis, broadcast on more than 1,400 public TV and radio stations around the world and on the Web. Goodman—with her co-authors, Mother Jones contributing writer David Goodman (co-author: Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times, 2008, etc.) and Democracy Now! contributor Moynihan—celebrates the program’s “remarkable journey” with this angry, hard-hitting volume. From Clinton to the current presidential campaign, no politician escapes the authors’ critique. They skewer the George W. Bush administration for lies that led America into a useless war and propelled us into the “endless war” that has followed. They condemn Barack Obama’s reliance on drones, pointing to casualties among children and families. “Militant groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda,” the authors write, “couldn’t have a more effective recruiting tool than the indiscriminate bombing and drone strikes by the United States.” The authors also discuss military interventions; whistleblowers (Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning merit praise) and the government’s attempt to quash them; immigration policy; capital punishment; income inequality; responses to climate change; the “routine” indignities inflicted on gay men and lesbians and the brave LGBTQ resisters; police brutality and the nation’s ineffectual and racist prison system; the Black Lives Matter movement; and the scandal of psychologists’ sanctioning of torture. “Independent media is the oxygen of democracy,” the authors assert.

An impassioned book aiming to fuel informed participation, outrage, and dissent.