Plaza Man: Bob Groden vs the city of Dallas

[Peter Lemkin]

Amy Goodman and Democracy Now seem to get lots of funding from various bigwig foundations - the Ford Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Threshold Foundation, the Tides Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. That's from a long list on Joel Van Der Reijden's ISGP page with a bunch of links and dry paragraphs of various funding totals attached. Given all that, I'd have to wonder if Goodman could cross the road without checking with her funders first.

Joel has also posted a PDF of an article by Bob Feldman from the Critical Sociology journal, Report from the Field: Left Media and Left Think Tanks - Foundation-Managed Protest? The PDF is from a big paperback volume so the excerpt runs from page 427 to page 446. Scroll down to page 440 and you get a list of various folk that have given Democracy Now some cash.

https://isgp-studies.com/miscellaneous/2...ations.pdf

I've never heard of most of those outfits, but elsewhere online I'm reading "According to the Lannan Foundation's Form 990 financial filing for 2008, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now Productions was given three grants, totalling $375,000, by the Lannan Foundation." Three years after that, here's John Pilger doing a piece for the New Statesman, noting how the Lannan Foundation ran around trying to bury his antiwar film THE WAR YOU DON'T SEE, and cancelled an appearance by Pilger.

https://www.newstatesman.com/world-affai...obama-film


That film is available at both links right below. I haven't watched it yet and probably should.

https://vimeo.com/67739294

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCWdwlkx-rE


Of course the DPF, quick off the mark, had a thread about that cancellation back in 2011..

https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...2eYiS1L1Bw

..and the thread reprints a funny letter Pilger wrote to Noam Chomsky. This cracked me up -

I urge you to visit the Lannan website www.lannan.org Good people like Michael Ratner, Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald are shown in participants in discussion about freedom of speech. I am there, too, but my name is the only one with a line through it and the word, 'Cancelled'.

So with all that said I'm not surprised Goodman is useless on some of the bigger issues.

There is little doubt the it is Goodman's funding that keeps her not talking about really BIG issues. She gives little hint what she herself thinks - but that hardly matters when she has such a big audience and big effect. We need other progressive voices without censorship to carry the message as well as DemocracyNow! and Chomsky - BETTER! [and likely without much if any funding!....]