Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back » (REV)

Amy Goodman is an internationally acclaimed journalist and host of the daily grassroots global news hour Democracy Now!, which airs on more than 600 radio and TV stations around the world and on democracynow.org. Democracy Now! is the largest media collaboration in North American public broadcasting. She has won many of the most prestigious awards in journalism, including the George Polk Award, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting.

Torture. Kidnapping. Bogus wars. Illegal wiretapping. Propaganda. Spies in the newsrooms. Oil profiteers. Soldiers who won't fight. Mothers of fallen soldiers Who will.

In Static, the bestselling brother-sister team of Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, and investigative journalist David Goodman takes on government liars, corporate profiteers, and the media that have acted as their cheerleaders. The authors cut through the official static to show the truth about war, torture, and government control of the media. Static breaks the sound barrier to present the voices of dissidents, activists, and others who are often frozen out of official debate.

Read Static. Become informed. Fight back. Defend democracy.

Publishers Weekly

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. The book should be popular with fans of the show. (Sept. 5) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.