Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back

Saturday, October 14th
3:00pm Gregg Hall, 100 Porter Hall
Amy Goodman
Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back

Amy Goodman is an award-winning journalist and host of Democracy Now!
the daily, grassroots, global, radio/TV news hour. (You can listen to Democracy Now! daily at 8am on WRCT 88.3FM and watch it on PCTV 21
(cable).)

She's on a national "Breaking the Sound Barrier" speaking tour to mark the 10th anniversary of Democracy Now! & launch her second book with journalist David Goodman, Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back.

Here's what Publishers Weekly wrote about the new book:

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and her author brother, David Goodman, follow up their bestseller The Exception to the Rulers by again synthesizing radio interviews and commentary with secondary sources on charged issues that the corporate media too often overlook. "The Bush administration is obsessed with controlling the flow of information,"
the authors declare, citing examples from Iraq to Katrina. One glaring hypocrisy is the president's claim that "we do not render to countries that torture"; the authors find mounds of evidence to the contrary. They also remind us of the unseemly ties between Republican Party supporters and Pentagon contracts in Iraq. In one hilarious episode lightly reported in the U.S. media -- a British activist group, the Yes Men, hoaxed the BBC regarding Dow Chemical's apparent willingness to apologize for the Bhopal disaster. On Goodman's show, a former U.S. Army interrogator acknowledged that 98% of those picked up in Iraq "had not done anything."

A brief final section highlights those who fight back, including antiwar mom Cindy Sheehan, and a former British ambassador in Uzbekistan who blew the whistle on that regime's human rights abuses.

Questions regarding this lecture speaker? Please contact Danny Sleator at sleator@cs.cmu.edu.