After our broadcast interview with legal scholar and civil rights advocate, Michelle Alexander, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez continued the conversation. Be the first to watch it here.

An unusual trial begins in Israel this week, and people around the world will be watching closely. It involves the tragic death of a 23-year-old American student named Rachel Corrie. On March 16, 2003, she was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer.

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Sixteen Midwestern towns and cities have sued the manufacturer of a popular weedkiller over drinking water contamination. The weedkiller Atrazine manufactured by Syngenta is commonly used in Midwestern cornfields. The lawsuit was filed by towns and cities in Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and Iowa. Atrazine has been banned in the European Union since 2004 but here in the United States about 80 million pounds of Atrazine is used each year. A recent study found that the weedkillers can turn male frogs into females. The chemicals in the weedkiller atrazine disrupt development and make frogs develop both male and female features.

Coverage by Huffington Post Investigative Fund

See our earlier segment on Atrazine and the EPA

Diane Ravitch is a former Assistant Secretary of Education and counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H.W. Bush and was appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board under President Clinton. She is the author of over twenty books, is research professor of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

She’s long been known as an advocate of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, standardized testing, and using the free market to improve schools. But she’s had a radical change of heart, as chronicled in her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch says, “The evidence says No Child Left Behind was a failure, and charter schools aren’t going to be any better.”

In 1964, media analyst Marshall McLuhan suggested that a given medium was more important than its message.

Kimberly Butler of the Huffington Post interviews Amy Goodman along with Dan Rather, Geraldo Rivera, Tim Zagat, Rachel Sklar, Carol Jenkins, Bill Pullman, Bob Simon, John Ziegler, Juan Williams, Kevin Macdonald , Mary Alice Williams, and Stephen Cannell.

March is Women’s History Month, recognizing women’s central role in society. Unfortunately, violence against women is epidemic in the United States and around the world.

Domestic violence is on the minds of many now, as reports published by The New York Times implicate New York Gov. David Paterson in an alleged attempt to influence a domestic violence case against one of his top aides. The Times reports, based in part on unnamed sources, say that the Paterson aide, David W. Johnson, attacked his girlfriend on Halloween night, Oct. 31, 2009, “choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help.” New York state police from the governor’s personal protection detail contacted the victim, despite having no jurisdiction. Then the governor himself intervened, the Times alleges, asking two aides to contact the victim and to arrange a phone call between him and the victim. The call occurred on Feb. 7 of this year, the night before the victim was to appear in court to request an order of protection from Johnson. She did not appear in court, and the case was dismissed. After the exposé, the governor ended his bid for election and suspended Johnson without pay.

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Mike Markham of Colorado has an explosive problem: His tap water catches fire. Markham demonstrates this in a new documentary, “Gasland,” which just won the Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Prize. Director Josh Fox films Markham as he runs his kitchen faucet, holding a cigarette lighter up to the running water. After a few seconds, a ball of fire erupts out of the sink, almost enveloping Markham’s head.

The source of the flammable water, and the subject of “Gasland,” is the mining process called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

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Friends of Howard Zinn gathered at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC to pay tribute to the historian who died on January 27th. The speakers include Ralph Nader, Marian Wright Edelman, Amy Goodman, Dave Zirin, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Phyllis Bennis, Geoffrey Millard, Richard Rubenstein and Busboys and Poets’ owner Andy Shallal. The program also includes music by Bernice Johnson Reagon and Emma’s Revolution as well as readings from Howard Zinn’s books.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Jospeh Stiglitz joins us to discuss the stimulus, the state of the economy and his new book, Freefall

President Barack Obama is going nuclear. He announced the initial $8 billion in loan guarantees for construction of the first new nuclear power plants in the United States in close to three decades. Obama is making good on a campaign pledge, like his promises to escalate the war in Afghanistan and to unilaterally attack in Pakistan. And like his “Af-Pak” war strategy, Obama’s publicly financed resuscitation of the nuclear power industry in the U.S. is bound to fail, another taxpayer bailout waiting to happen.

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The 2009 George Polk Awards were announced on Monday. Two of the winners include reporters featured on Democracy Now!:

• Environmental Reporting
  Abrahm Lustgarten for documenting the deadly side effects of hydraulic fracturing

• Military Reporting
  Charlie Reed and others at Stars and Stripes for revealing the Pentagon used PR firm the Rendon Group to profile journalists covering the Afghanistan war

On Thursday the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) awarded Juan Gonzalez, Co-Host of Democracy Now! and Staff Columnist at the New York Daily News with the 2010 Justice in Action Award. Amy Goodman presented the Award at AALDEF’s Annual Lunar New Year Gala.

The tragedy of the Haitian earthquake continues to unfold, with slow delivery of aid, the horrific number of amputations performed out of desperate medical necessity, more than a million homeless, perhaps 240,000 dead, hunger, dehydration, the emergence of infections and waterborne diseases, and the approach of the rainy season, which will be followed by the hurricane season. Haiti has suffered a massive blow, an earthquake for which its infrastructure was not prepared, after decades—no, centuries—of military and economic manipulation by foreign governments, most notably the United States and France.

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Amy Goodman talks to Raj Patel, author of “The Value of Nothing” and Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine,” about their books, the economy, the earthquake in Haiti, and other topics.

On C-SPAN’s Book TV:

• Sunday, February 7th at 3pm (ET)
• Monday, February 8th at 5am (ET)

Raj Patel is a fellow at the Institute for Food & Development/Food First and has written for the Guardian and Los Angeles Times. He is currently a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies. For more information, visit rajpatel.org.

Naomi Klein writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian. She is the author of “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies” and “Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate.” For more information, visit naomiklein.org.

Amy Goodman is the host of Democracy Now!, a daily public tv/radio news hour which airs on more than 800 stations. Her latest bestseller is Breaking the Sound Barrier. She co-authored the first three bestsellers, Standing Up to the Madness, Static, and The Exception to the Rulers, with her brother, journalist David Goodman. For more information, visit democracynow.org.

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Lily Tomlin gave Democracy Now! a shout out in Time Magazine’s “Short List of Things To Do.” Here’s the excerpt from Tomlin’s short list:

Radio days
Stephanie Miller as commentator-comic Mama and her irreverent two-man band of merrymaking mischief monkeys get me laughing every morning. Then I get deeply serious with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

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Nominations have been announced for the 82nd annual Academy Awards. In the documentary category, three films featured on Democracy Now! in the past year received nods:

* China’s Unnatural Disaster

* The Most Dangerous Man in America

* Burma VJ

Howard Zinn, legendary historian, author and activist, died last week at the age of 87. His most famous book is “A People’s History of the United States.” Zinn told me last May, “The idea of ‘A People’s History’ is to go beyond what people have learned in school … history through the eyes of the presidents and the generals in the battles fought in the Civil War, [to] the voices of ordinary people, of rebels, of dissidents, of women, of black people, of Asian-Americans, of immigrants, of socialists and anarchists and troublemakers of all kinds.”

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Howard Zinn, one of the country’s most celebrated historians and author of the seminal work A People’s History of the United States, died of a heart attack Wednesday in Santa Monica, California. He was 87. Over the years, Zinn was a frequent guest on Democracy Now!

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Jean Montrevil was shackled, imprisoned, about to be sent to Haiti. It was Jan. 6, days before the earthquake that would devastate Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Montrevil came to the U.S. with a green card in 1986 at the age of 17. Twenty years ago, still a teenager, he was convicted of possession of cocaine and sent to prison for 11 years. Upon release, he married a U.S. citizen; he has four U.S.-citizen children, owns a business, pays taxes and is a legal, permanent resident. He is a well-respected Haitian New York community activist. But because of his earlier conviction, he was on an immigration supervision program, requiring him to check in with an immigration official every two weeks. On Dec. 30, during his routine visit, he was immediately detained and told he would be deported to Haiti. A fellow detainee bound for Haiti had a fever. That man’s illness halted the flight, and then the earthquake struck.

Has the mainstream media in the US replaced serious coverage with “junk news” and tabloidism? Especially in foreign affairs, are Americans less informed than ever? Who is shaping their perceptions of the rest of the world? And who is policing US foreign policy?

Riz Khan speaks with Amy Goodman and Professor John Maxwell Hamilton, the author of Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting.

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