Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Izzy Award honors Goodman and Greenwald


Blogger Glenn Greenwald and Democracy Now! host and executive producer Amy Goodman received the first annual Izzy Award on March 31 at the State Street Theater in Ithaca, NY. The award was presented by Ithaca College's Park Center for Independent Media.

Both Greenwald and Goodman spoke to an audience of nearly 800 college students and local residents at the award ceremony. Their speeches touched on our nation's distorted concept of journalism and the independent media's adversarial relationship with mainstream corporate media.

"If you think about it, the term independent media is a strange term," said Greenwald. "The concept of independence is so inherent in what journalism is that if someone says 'independent journalism' it should strike us as a ridiculous redundancy."

Greenwald said that mainstream journalism is conducted in such a way that it is completely devoid of independence. Journalists working for corporate media tend to push conventional tripe as truth and call it journalism. Independent journalists -- especially bloggers -- have a responsibility to be adversarial to those in power, to question and undermine what the government and mainstream media is reporting, said Greenwald.

"Bloggers are a reaction to the things that mainstream journalists do," said Greenwald.

Greenwald believes that the definition of blogging goes beyond a content's format. Just because a mainstream journalists writes online does not mean he is blogging. Bloggers have a distinct and radically different mentality than other journalists. Unlike most journalists, bloggers tend not to be "meek, mindless and deferential."

Goodman's speech focused on the power of grassroots organizing for demanding change from the media and the government.

"Grassroots pressure has the ability to flash a spotlight on injustice and force change," she said.

While journalists will sometimes report the opinions of a minority group -- the "far left," for example -- they will take those viewpoints and isolate them in a quote or sound byte. Rarely does the media report on "the mechanisms for social change from which [those viewpoints] arose." This distorts or hides the full picture of political and ideological debate taking place within American society.

Goodman believes that if the American citizenry takes it into their own hands to make their voices heard, the mainstream media will be forced to respond and present a full spectrum of opinion.

"The media is most dangerous when people are aloud to speak for themselves," she said. "We need media that builds bridges between communities, not bombs bridges."

Goodman sees the media as a huge kitchen table, stretching across the globe, where people of different races, nations and cultures can discuss their communal issues.
She encouraged those in the audience to get involved in the political and social justice issues that matter to them most, so that their voices might be "brought to the table" and, hopefully, incite change. "Half of life is just showing up," she said, quoting Woody Allen.

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