Amy Goodman | BernieCrats.com

Biography

Amy Goodman is an American broadcast journalist and the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, the daily independent news hour she co-founded in 1996 and has anchored for three decades. Raised on Long Island, New York, she has built a career on a simple guiding principle she often repeats: journalists should “go to where the silence is” — reporting the stories and voices that corporate media routinely leaves out.

Goodman has reported from some of the most dangerous and consequential places of the last thirty years, including East Timor, where she survived a massacre by Indonesian troops; Nigeria, where she covered oil-industry violence; and North Dakota, where she documented the crackdown on Standing Rock pipeline protesters. She was arrested and manhandled by police while covering the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota — an incident that drew national attention to press-freedom violations at political events.

Democracy Now! airs on more than 1,500 public television, radio, and internet stations worldwide, and operates without government funding, advertising, or corporate underwriting — sustained entirely by its viewers and listeners. Goodman co-hosts the program with Juan González and Nermeen Shaikh.

Her honors include the Right Livelihood Award (often called the “Alternative Nobel Prize”), the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, and the Gandhi Peace Award. She has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers, including Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America. In 2026, the documentary Steal This Story, Please!, directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, chronicled her career and the history of the program she built.

Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! began in 1996 as a daily election-coverage program on nine Pacifica radio stations. It expanded to television the week of the September 11, 2001 attacks and has grown into one of the largest independent news operations in the United States, reporting on war, peace, climate, labor, and social-justice movements largely absent from mainstream coverage.

In March 2026, more than 2,000 people packed New York’s historic Riverside Church to celebrate the program’s 30th anniversary, with appearances by Angela Davis, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and Michael Stipe. The following month, the documentary Steal This Story, Please! premiered in theaters nationwide, tracing Goodman’s career and the model of audience-funded journalism she helped pioneer.

Press freedom

War & peace

Climate justice

Labor movements

Media consolidation

Social movements