During the Election 2012 Silenced Majority 100-city tour, Colorado Springs Independent profiles Amy Goodman in Independent Streak

It’s difficult for Amy Goodman to carve out time for an interview.

On Monday, Goodman and company pulled into Blacksburg, Va., site of a Democracy Now! broadcast. She was scheduled to tour the Virginia Tech University campus, where 32 people were killed in the 2007 massacre. After that, she was headed to Colorado, with a stop in Boulder and then Denver, to host an alternative to the presidential debate.

As she explains, “We are going to broadcast the debate, and expand it” — allowing the third-party candidates to respond to the same questions posed to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

Then on Thursday, Goodman comes to Colorado Springs for a 7 p.m. benefit for KRCC 91.5 FM, at the just-opened Tim Gill Center for Public Media. That’s where she’ll broadcast her Friday show.

It’s part of a 100-city tour to promote her new book, The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, co-authored by Democracy Now! alum Denis Moynihan. But no matter how big it (or her syndicated column) gets, Goodman almost certainly will stay best-known for Democracy Now! itself.

The radio show, which began 16 years ago, is now carried by 1,100 stations worldwide. (An actual campaign to bring the show to KRCC prefaced its adoption in 2007.) The program has helped establish the careers of Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, whose reporting from Egypt during the revolution set the pace for American journalists. It’s won numerous awards for its groundbreaking investigative reporting, affording ample air time and detailed research to subject matter that most mainstream media outlets either ignore or treat with cursory interest.

Much of the credit must rest with Goodman, 55, whose unrelenting drive has provided a unique and popular voice among independent media. Twenty-one years ago, she was beaten as she documented a slaughter in the island nation of East Timor. She was working on a documentary about a genocide that she says had gone completely ignored by the mainstream press. It was a foundational experience, fueling her mission to create not only independent journalism, but also the means to get it to the masses.

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