A Grass-Roots Newscast Gives a Voice to Struggles
Brian Stelter
New York Times, 23 October 2011
EXTRACT
Some fans as well as critics describe “Democracy Now!” as progressive, but Ms. Goodman rejects that label and prefers to call it a global newscast that has “people speaking for themselves.” She criticized networks in the United States that have brought on professional pundits, rather than actual protesters, to discuss the Occupy protests.
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’s arrest and prosecution. But one of the men, Murat Kurnaz, a former prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, was interviewed at length by Ms. Goodman and her co-host, Juan Gonzalez.
Phi Beta Iota: Now that the rest of the world has seen that the US Courts are generally corrupt and will not entertain law suits against those that led the US to an elective war costing trillions and including crimes against humanity at multiple levels, we anticipate a flood of law suits against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, among others. As committed as we are to Truth & Reconciliation (with presidential pardons when full truth has been offered to the public by the individual concerned) we fear that absent a restoration of integrity to the electoral process and to the US Government in the 2012 elections, we are in for a decade of revenge against specific individuals and specific banks now known to have betrayed the public trust.