It is absolutely critical that we have an independent media. The media are the most powerful institutions on earth, more powerful than any bomb, than any missile. The Pentagon has deployed the media and we have to take it back.
My brother David Goodman and I have written Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back. Why the title Static? Because in this high tech digital age, with high definition television and digital radio, all we get is ever more static, that veil of lies, misrepresentations, half-truths, and omissions that obscure reality. What we need is a different kind of static. The media should be giving the dictionary definition of static, and that is “criticism, opposition, unwanted interference.” We need a media that covers power, not covers for power. We need a media that is the fourth estate, not for the state. And we need a media that covers the movements that create static and make history.
At Democracy Now! our motto is, “Steal this story, please.” We call it “trickle up journalism.” One example is the story of Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi architect and blogger who now lives in this country. He was boarding a Jet Blue plane from New York City to San Francisco, where he lived, when he found himself surrounded by four transportation officials. They told him he couldn’t get on the plane if he was going to wear this t-shirt. When he asked the transportation officials what was wrong with his t-shirt, they said they thought it was threatening. He was wearing a black t-shirt with white letters that said, “We will not be silent.”
Raed asked, “What’s threatening about that?” They said, “It’s not the English, it’s the Arabic script above it.” He said, “That’s just Arabic for ‘we will not be silent.’” And they said, “We can’t know that, we don’t have a translator here.” Raed replied, “Are you saying Arabic is a terrorist language?” And they said, “ Wearing a t-shirt with Arabic script onto an American plane today is like walking into a bank with a t-shirt that says, “I am a robber.”
He argued with them. He said he was a taxpayer and this violated his rights. But a Jet Blue employee got him another t-shirt and he was forced to put it on. Then they brought him onto the plane. He had reserved a seat in the front. They put him on before all the other passengers, and they escorted him to the back of the bus—I mean plane. And then they brought all the other passengers on. That’s how he flew to San Francisco.
We ran the story on Democracy Now! a few days later. The next day, some women came into our studio all wearing “We will not be silent” t-shirts. They were headed to airports. They said it didn’t matter where they were going, they were just getting on planes.
After we ran this story, it went big. All the networks picked it up, which was highly unusual. In this country, we live in a globalized world, and yet we are so isolated when it comes to information in the United States. But they did go with the story.
When these women came back from challenging high flying profiling, we had one of them on the show. Her name was Laurie Arbeiter, and she was wearing this t-shirt when she came on the show. She’d given Raed the t-shirt. They started giving out these t-shirts on March 20, the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
Since this story went big, thousands of people are ordering these t-shirts at wewillnotbesilent@gmail.com. And they’re translating them into many languages. Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Spanish, French and now the original German.
Why German? It goes back to World War II and the White Rose Collective, a brother and sister, named Hans and Sophie Scholl. They wanted to do something, together with other professors and students in Germany. They weren’t Jewish, they were German Christians and they thought the best they could do was give out information. And so they started to make a series of pamphlets so that the Germans could never say, “We didn’t know.”
They did six pamphlets in all. The fourth said at the bottom, “We will not be silent.” They were captured and arrested by the Nazis—Hans and Sophie and other members of the collective. They were tried. They were found guilty and beheaded. But that philosophy, that motto, should be the Hippocratic oath of the media today: We will not be silent!
Excerpted from Amy Goodman’s plenary talk at the 2006 Bioneers Conference. Goodman is the executive producer and host of the acclaimed Democracy Now! on Pacifica Radio, and formerly served as news director for WBAI in New York. To purchase a DVD of Goodman’s plenary,"Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders and the People who Fight Back,” visit the Bioneers store.
