There are the ladies on the right: Laura Ingraham, Anne Coulter. There are the ladies on the left: Rachel Maddow, Laura Flanders. Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Network's Democracy Now!, is just about as left as they come; she's the kind of liberal Rush Limbaugh loves to hate; she could be the model for his portrait of the lunatic left. Moreover, she would probably welcome his bloviating attack. There could be no better sign of a person's righteousness and basic humanity than to be the object of the Limbaugh ire.
Breaking the Sound Barrier, her latest book, is a collection of her weekly syndicated columns for King Features from 2006 through the summer of 2009. She speaks out on nearly all of the hot button issues of the period — the war in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, immigration, illegal wiretapping. Columns are organized by topical sections ( War, Health Care, Media, etc.), and within each section they follow chronologically. You name it, if it was in the news, she has something to say about it, and it is usually something at the very least thought provoking. And more often than not it expresses a point of view and focuses on information you are not likely to find in the mainstream media, the mainstream media which she likes to castigate as the "corporate" media.
It is ironic that, flaming liberal that she is, she has as little use for the mainstream media, as the right wing zealots do. "It is," she says, "the responsibility of journalists to go where the silence is, to seek out news and people who are ignored, to accurately and clearly report on the issues — issues that the corporate, for-profit media often distort, if they cover them at all." If this is her mission, she does it well. Whether she is making a case for why minor candidates should be included in the presidential debates, or criticizing the American Psychological Association for its failure to demand that its members take no part in the government's torture programs, she expresses a point of view not often heard on the major networks or in the pages of News Corp's various organs.
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