Democracy Now! — Jan 5: As voters in Georgia cast their ballots in two key runoff races that will determine control of the U.S. Senate, voting rights activists fear many eligible voters will be turned away at the polls.
Georgia has been called “ground zero” for Republican voter suppression efforts in the U.S., and in September the ACLU of Georgia revealed 198,000 voters had been wrongly purged from the voting rolls.
Democracy Now! airs a report into voting in Georgia by investigative journalist Greg Palast, narrated by the actress Debra Messing, and speaks with voting rights activist LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund.
“I think it’s quite interesting and coincidental … that many of them on that list are African American voters,” says Brown. “This is voter suppression.”
Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide. She has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest, Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America, looks back over the past two decades of Democracy Now! and the powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our world.
Goodman has received the Society for Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence; American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award; the Paley Center for Media’s She’s Made It Award; and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Her reporting on East Timor and Nigeria has won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award, Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its “Pick of the Podcasts,” along with NBC’s Meet the Press. PULSE named Goodman one of the 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009.
She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Project Censored. Goodman received the first ever Communication for Peace Award from the World Association for Christian Communication. She was also honored by the National Council of Teachers of English with the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language.
