Politics & Power Quote by Amy Goodman

Cable news loves a costume change: put a former general in a studio, pin on an American flag, and suddenly you have “analysis” that just happens to align with the institutions that fought the war, funded the war, and sold the war. Amy Goodman’s line cuts through that theater with an accusation about incentives. “Parade” is doing heavy lifting: it conjures choreography, spectacle, a march of predictable faces moving past the camera on cue. War, in this framing, becomes pageantry - clean, authoritative, narratable - rather than chaos experienced by civilians and enlisted troops.

The real sting is in “posing as reporters.” Goodman isn’t only criticizing individual pundits; she’s calling out a system that launders power into credibility. Retired generals and “government flacks” arrive with built-in access, a ready-made network, and a worldview shaped by chain-of-command thinking. Their presence narrows the story to tactics, optics, and “what we should do next,” crowding out questions about legality, human cost, corruption, and who benefits when the fighting drags on. It’s a critique of epistemology: who gets to define reality on live TV.

Context matters. Goodman’s career is rooted in adversarial journalism and anti-propaganda instincts sharpened by the post-9/11 media era, when embedded reporting and security-state messaging blended into a single aesthetic. The intent isn’t to ban expertise; it’s to expose how “expertise” becomes a revolving door - and how war coverage, when filtered through the voices of its managers, starts to sound less like witness and more like recruitment.