Amy Goodman

Media should not be a tool only of the powerful. The media can be a platform for the most important debates of our day: war and peace, freedom and tyranny. The debate must be wide-ranging not just a narrow discussion between Democrats and Republicans embedded in the establishment. We need to break open the box, tear down the boundaries that currently define acceptable discussion. We need a democratic media.

Why has Democracy Now! grown so quickly? Because of the deafening silence in the mainstream media around the issues-and the people that matter most. People are now confronting the most important issues of the millennium: war and peace, life and death. Yet who is shaping the discourse? Generals, corporate executives, and government officials.

While the networks were quoting the police saying that they weren't using rubber bullets, independent media reporters were uploading minute-by-minute images as we all picked up the bullets off the street by the handful. While the networks caricatured protesters, showing an endless loop of a single smashed store window, the IMC reporters were interviewing the mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons who had come together to protest against the threat that the WTO posed to their communities. In the IMC dispatches, these people had real names, real jobs, and real concerns.

We have a decision to make every hour of every day, and that is whether to represent the sword or the shield. Democracy now.

We must build a trickle-up media that reflects the true character of this country and its people. A democratic media serving a democratic society.

In 1981, the KKK's Grand Wizard claimed that his greatest act "was engineering the bombing of a left-wing radio station," because he understood how dangerous Pacifica was.

Declaring war on the media is a desperate and risky move. But the corporate media, so compromised and atrophied by its own complicity in promoting the lies of the Bush administration, is woefully unprepared to do battle. If the past is any guide, as the government aims a sword at the heart of our civil liberties and freedoms, the media will provide sporadic resistance at best, and at worst, will help drive the sword home.

It's a sad day when the government no longer has to cover up its dishonesty because the American media does it for them...This is the state of the corporate media today. It's a symptom of what we call the access of evil: journalists trading truth for access. The public unwittingly mistakes the illusion of news for reality.

imagine if the U.S. media showed uncensored, hellish images of war-even for one week. What impact would that have? I think we would be able to abolish war.

It's still much the same. On any given day, you can listen to the news on CNN or National Public Radio, then tune in to a Pacifica station. You would think you were hearing reports from different Planets. We inhabit the same planet, but we see it through different lenses.

The lesson had been learned from Vietnam-a lesson in manipulation. In Iraq, there would be no daily television images of the human toll of war. The government and the media would portray a clean war, a war nearly devoid of victims.

The Bush team has invoked a basic principle of propaganda: Control the images and you control the people.