Amy Goodman seems like a good person

Do you remember the heyday of the"embedded journalist"?

I'm almost certain the term was first used during the first Gulf War in 1990, when our nation was young and inexperienced in matters of the Mideast, to describe the practice of American journalists invited to ride in US military combat vehicles etcetc. for the purpose of providing first-person journalistic narratives of the war for the consumption of the corporate media outlets who were in turn broadcasting the war to the American public.

Embedding a journalist, allowing a journalist so close the military action that he or she was required to wear a combat helmet, gave the appearance of the military being completely transparent, when in fact the opposite might have been intended: the embedded journalist was a mouthpiece for the American military, telling the stories the military wanted told.

Listening to Amy Goodman speak last night at The Nourse Theatre in San Francisco, I remembered the term, "embedded journalist", and started obsessing about the part the media plays in the national social experimental exercise we think of as, "democracy."

Amy Goodman is anything but an embedded journalist. She's more like a journalist observing embedded journalists, among other things, keeping her eye on causes and effects independently, as all unembedded journalists like to do. She made the case frequently in her conversation that a free and independent press is indispensable to the maintenance of a healthy democracy, and that without it we're likely to keep getting our news from embedded journalists writing for embedded news organizations.

Some of Amy Goodman's discussion revolved around the Donald Trump phenomenon: Trump's been lavishly gifted by the US media with over $2 billion in free media coverage--2 times as much as all the other candidates combined. Amy Goodman made this an example of the corporatization of the American media enterprise; that Trump uses the media, that he's been able to seize and control great swathes of the media landscape to his advantage, and to the great detriment of a candidate like Bernie Sanders.

Walking out of the theater, two things occurred to me: 1) that Trump is doing the nation a great service by running for president, exposing, as his candidacy is, nothing less than the corruption of the process and the hollowness of the national political situation and 2) that in giving Donald Trump free media, the media may possibly be doing us a great favor, allowing even those attracted to his candidacy more than enough opportunities to see its great folly.