Democracy Now! Journalist Amy Goodman is 2007 New College Commencement Speaker

(March 15, 2007) – Journalist Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of the daily radio and television news program Democracy Now! will be the graduation speaker May 25 at the 41st annual commencement at New College of Florida.

Goodman, who recently began a weekly syndicated column with King Features, has won many of the most prestigious awards in journalism for her reporting on East Timor and Nigeria, including the George Polk Award, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Prize for International Reporting. She has also received awards from the Associated Press, United Press International, Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Project Censored.

She is co-author of two New York Times best-sellers: the 2006 book, Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back, and the 2004 book, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them, both co-written with her brother, investigative journalist David Goodman.

Goodman began her career in community radio in 1985 at Pacifica Radio's New York station, WBAI, where she produced the "Evening News" for 10 years.

She worked on the award-winning documentary, "Massacre: The Story of East Timor," that reported on the killing of 270 East Timorese and the beating of Goodman and her colleague Allan Nairn by Indonesian soldiers. She also worked on an award-winning radio documentary, "Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship," that exposed Chevron's role in the killing of two Nigerian villagers who had protested an oil spill in their community. In 1999, Goodman was the first journalist to interview American political prisoner Lori Berenson in prison in Peru.

Democracy Now! is a national, independent, award-winning news program airing on more than 500 radio and TV stations in North America. The program, which Goodman helped to launch on Pacifica Radio in 1996, is broadcast on Pacifica, National Public Radio, community and college stations, public-access cable-television stations, satellite television, shortwave radio, the Internet and as a podcast. Democracy Now! is produced out of the Downtown Community Television Center in New York City’s Chinatown.

The Democracy Now! radio program is heard locally on Tampa's WMNF 88.5FM, Monday-Friday from noon to 1 p.m.; and on Sarasota's WSLR 96.5FM, Monday-Friday, 6-7 p.m.

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New College of Florida is a national leader in the arts and sciences and is the State of Florida’s designated honors college for the liberal arts. Rated as the #1 public liberal arts college in America by U.S. News & World Report ("America's Best Colleges, 2007 Edition"), New College attracts highly-motivated, academically-talented students from throughout the United States, as well as 27 foreign countries.