President Clinton has called her "hostile, combative, and even disrespectful." The Indonesian military has declared her "a threat to national security." Newt Gingrich has advised his "mother to talk to no reporters because of people like (her)."
Now, Amy Goodman, the award-winning journalist and host of "Democracy Now!," along with her brother David, is stepping out of the radio studio to expose the lies, propaganda and cover-ups running rampant in the upper echelons of leadership in the new book, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media Who Love Them.
While bookstores around the country are loaded with political commentary, few writers, if any, do it as well as Goodman. With a combination of nightmare-inspiring revelations and rock-solid evidence, Goodman manages to expose not only overlooked genocides, corporate war profiteering and blatant civil rights violations here and overseas, but also the U.S. government and media complacency.
Now the only question left: Is anyone listening?
In chapter one she details a firsthand account of the Indonesian military's slaughter of the Timorese - a little-known minority group that has almost been wiped out with American-supplied weapons. Goodman also exposes the blatant war-mongering propaganda levied against the American people by the White House and mainstream media. Goodman reclaims the voice of the people from the corporate media that is responsible for blinding Americans to the reality of war and money and the leaders who lust after them.
Goodman is angry. As one of the lonely voices in an ever-shrinking independent media, she has seen the corporate and political buyout of mainstream news and its role in the engineered ignorance of the American public. Part of her book deals with exactly this issue.
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"Clear Channel is hardwired into the Bush political machine," Goodman writes. "During the war in Iraq, Clear Channel stations sponsored pro-war rallies for America around the country. After promoting these contrived events, stations reported on them on their news shows as if there were somehow spontaneous outpourings of support for George W. Bush."
Goodman doesn't just write about doom and gloom, though. Buried deep in the commentary on the wickedness innate in our world, she writes about hope. People are becoming aware of the deceptions in the government and becoming active, she writes, in pursuing the basic human rights that the Constitution is founded on.
Despite the slant of Exception to the Rulers, Goodman is clearly a non-partisan journalist. She attacks every issue with an intellectual and well-researched approach. Any individual with something to hide takes the hot seat.
As an interviewer, Goodman is a bulldog, and she dispels the notion that journalist should be anything but champions of the truth.
"Journalists are not entertainers," Goodman writes. "We are reporters. We go to places that are unpopular. We broadcast voices that are controversial. We are not here to win popularity contests. We are here to cover the issues critical to a democratic society. We have to pressure the media, to shame the media into going into these forgotten places where so many are sent to waste away in silence."
So, regardless of your political slant, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers and the Media Who Love Them is a book that sets itself apart from every other political commentary because Goodman isn't writing to entertain - which she does anyway - but to expose the truth.
