ABOUT THE BOOK:

From the authors of the New York Times bestseller The Exception to the Rulers comes a new book that pushes back against official lies and spin and gives voice to the silenced majority

In Static, the brother-sister team of Amy Goodman, host of the popular international TV and radio news show Democracy Now!, and investigative journalist David Goodman once again take on government liars, corporate profiteers, and the media that has acted as their megaphone. They expose how the Bush administration has manipulated and fabricated news and how the corporate media has worked hand in glove with the powerful to deceive the public. The Goodmans cut through the spin and static to offer the truth about war, torture, and government control of the media. Mixing investigative reporting and interviews, Static presents voices of dissidents, activists, and others who are too often frozen out of official debate, to shed new light on urgent issues of war and peace. Ultimately, Static is a hopeful, fighting rallying call for people to take back our government, our media,and our world.

Democracy Now! broadcasts on more than 500 radio and TV stations, including Pacifica, NPR stations, low power fm, college and community radio stations, PBS stations and public access cable TV stations. Millions of viewers can tune into Democracy Now! through Free Speech TV and Link TV, broadcasting on both TV satellite networks, Dish Network and DirecTV.

Millions of people visit democracynow.org each month. In 2006, Time Magazine identified Democracy Now! along with Meet the Press as their "Pick of the Podcasts." More than 70 radio stations throughout the US and Latin America now carry Democracy Now!'s daily Spanish headlines. More than 15,000 people signed up for Boletin, a text version of its Spanish headlines. Today, 75,000 people receive its English language Daily Digest.


PRAISE:

"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."

– Publisher's Weekly


ForThe Exception to the Rulers:

"Amy Goodman has taken investigative journalism to new heights."

– Noam Chomsky, author 9/11 and Hegemony or Survival

"Amy Goodman has carried the great muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and I.F. Stone into the electronic age, creating a powerful counter to the mainstream media. Her programs have reached into homes across the country, educating a new generation of listeners on the realities of U.S. policy at home and abroad. The book she has done with her brother is a very welcome and important addition to the dissident literature of our time."

– Howard Zinn, author, A People’s History of the United States

"The Exception to the Rulers is a brilliant example of the flourishing of dissent in the United States. It’s an exciting guide book for people of conscience about how to tip the balance sooner rather than later. It’s been written by wonderful people who wake up every morning year after year, with justice on their minds. That could have been boring, or intimidating, if the stories weren’t wonderfully told. Believe me, they are. This is a wonderful, revealing book."

– Arundhati Roy, author, The God of Small Things and War Talk, from the preface to the Italian edition

"Journalist and radio host Goodman brings her hard-hitting, no-holds-barred brand of reporting to an array of human rights, government accountability and media responsibility issues, and the result is bracing and timely. Goodman isn't about to let anyone slide by with easy explanations, not even then President Clinton when he called in on her daily Pacifica news show. And she is fierce and tireless in her commitment to dig behind official versions of the facts to get to very different stories ... Instances in which newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post have published stories based on leaked reports from unnamed government sources only to have to retract the stories later as being unfounded allow Goodman to argue that sophisticated news management techniques of spin, disinformation and controlled access to sources are undermining the reliability of media reporting. How, she asks, could journalists "embedded" with U.S. troops in Iraq be objective reporters of all that was occurring there, and whose interests were being served? These and other provocative questions power Goodman's stirring call for a democratic media serving a democratic society."

– Publishers Weekly

"Goodman's ... first book, coauthored with her brother, David, recounts some of her most hard-hitting confrontations with corporate types and politicos of all persuasions, covering much of the same territory as other anti-Bush books and then some, at a compelling, breathless pace. Her real target, however, is not the oil-defense-politics Establishment, but their enablers, the media, which are cowed less by their corporate owners than by their own capacity for self-censorship in the guise of patriotism."

– Booklist


ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Amy Goodman began her career in community radio in 1985 at Pacifica Radio’s New York Station, WBAI. She produced WBAI’s Evening News for 10 years. In 1990 and 1991, Amy traveled to East Timor to report on the US-backed Indonesian occupation of East Timor. There, she and colleague Allan Nairn witnessed Indonesian soldiers gun down 270 East Timorese. Indonesian soldiers beat Amy and Allan, fracturing Allan’s skull. Their documentary, "Massacre: The Story of East Timor" won numerous awards, including the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton, the Armstrong Award, the Radio/Television News Directors Award, as well as awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

In 1996, Amy helped launch Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now!. Two years later, Amy and producer Jeremy Scahill went to Nigeria. Their radio documentary "Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria’s Oil Dictatorship" exposed Chevron’s role in the killing of two Nigerian villagers in the Niger Delta, who were protesting yet another oil spill in their community. That documentary won the George Polk Award, the Golden Reel for Best National Documentary from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and a Project Censored award. In 1999, Amy Goodman traveled to Peru to interview American political prisoner Lori Berenson. It was the first time a journalist had ever gotten into the prison to speak to her.

David Goodman is an award-winning independent journalist and the author of five books, including the critically acclaimed Fault Lines: Journeys Into the New South Africa (University of California Press, 1999; revised paperback, 2002). Archbishop Desmond Tutu hailed Fault Lines as "a searingly honest book by someone who really knows his subject." He is also a contributing writer for Mother Jones, and his articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Outside, Washington Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, The Nation, Village Voice, and other publications.

Amy and David Goodman are the authors of two other recent books:

Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times

The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them


RIGHTS INFORMATION:

Language/Territory	Publisher
Arabic/worldwide	All Prints Distributors and Publishers

Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:

Language/Territory	Subagent
Eastern Europe	Prava I Prevodi
English outside North America	David Grossman Literary Agency
French	Eliane Benisti Agency
German	Paul & Peter Fritz AG Literatur Agentur
Greek	Read n' Right Agency
Hebrew	The Deborah Harris Agency
Japanese	The English Agency (Japan) Ltd
Korean	Best Literary & Rights Agency
Portuguese	RIFF Agency
Russia and the Baltics	Prava I Prevodi
Scandinavia	Tönnheim Literary Agency
Spanish in Latin America	International Editors' Co., S.A.
Spanish in Spain	International Editors' Co., S.A.
Turkish	Anatolialit Agency