DemocracyNow.org<\/a>, which streams each hourlong newscast in full.<\/p>\nThe producers say the program is broadcast on more than 950 stations. But because the distribution is cobbled together and because the program has no commercials, no Nielsen ratings are available.<\/p>\n
The media, Ms. Goodman said in an interview last week, can be \u201cthe greatest force for peace on earth\u201d for \u201cit is how we come to understand each other.\u201d But she asserted that the views of a majority of Americans had been \u201csilenced by the corporate media.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhich is why we have to take it back,\u201d she said, echoing the sentiments of many of her fans.<\/p>\n
Friends and former colleagues describe Ms. Goodman as ferocious and persistent, traits that have not changed since the program\u2019s inception in 1996 on five Pacifica Radio stations.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the radio, she sounded at times like a giant, at others a giant slayer,\u201d said Jeremy Scahill, now an investigative reporter for The Nation magazine, who practically begged Ms. Goodman to let him volunteer for the program in 1997. She agreed and initially paid him $40 a day from her own pocket. On Facebook he lists the program as his college education.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat drove us was telling stories we felt were being ignored, misreported or underreported by corporate media outlets,\u201d Mr. Scahill said.<\/p>\n
The program slowly gained more stations and, amid a dispute with Pacifica, which was later resolved, it established itself as a nonprofit news organization in 2001. The week of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the program began to be simulcast on television. Since then, Ms. Goodman said, \u201cthe growth has just been phenomenal.\u201d<\/p>\n
While many media outlets were faulted for playing down antiwar protests after the attacks, \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d covered such events extensively.<\/p>\n
Some fans as well as critics describe \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d as progressive, but Ms. Goodman rejects that label and prefers to call it a global newscast that has \u201cpeople speaking for themselves.\u201d She criticized networks in the United States that have brought on professional pundits, rather than actual protesters, to discuss the Occupy protests.<\/p>\n
Last week, no United States television network covered the filing of a lawsuit in Canada by four men who said they had been tortured during the Bush administration and who are seeking Mr. Bush\u2019s arrest and prosecution. But one of the men, Murat Kurnaz, a former prisoner at Guant\u00e1namo Bay, was interviewed at length by Ms. Goodman and her co-host, Juan Gonzalez.<\/p>\n
The nonprofit nature of the program means that the producers \u201cnever have to worry about how an advertiser might feel,\u201d avoiding potential self-censorship, Mr. Burke said. But it also sharply limits the size of the staff. The program relies on volunteers to transcribe segments and, occasionally, to translate foreign-language interviews.<\/p>\n
Ms. Goodman regularly helps raise money for stations that broadcast the program. The Internet has given the program a global audience and the ability to reach that audience for more than an hour a day. On the evening of Sept. 21, the live stream about the execution of Mr. Davis was viewed more than 800,000 times.<\/p>\n
The live stream attested to \u201cthe hunger for this kind of information,\u201d Ms. Goodman said. \u201cYet there was no network that was there to cover this moment throughout the night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Except, in a sense, \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d was able to be that network, at least for a night.<\/p>\n
A version of this article appeared in print on October 24, 2011, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Grass-Roots Newscast Gives a Voice to Struggles.<\/h6>\n
Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Operated as a nonprofit organization and distributed on a patchwork of stations, channels and Web sites, \u201cDemocracy Now!\u201d is proudly independent, in that way appealing to hundreds of thousands of people who are skeptical of the news organizations that are owned by major media companies. The media, Amy Goodman said in an interview last week, can be \u201cthe greatest force for peace on earth\u201d for \u201cit is how we come to understand each other.\u201d But she asserted that the views of a majority of Americans had been \u201csilenced by the corporate media.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}