Public broadcaster extraordinaire and co-host of Democracy Now! Amy Goodman was the featured guest of this week’s episode of New Mexico In Focus.

Goodman is on a 70-city tour promoting her newest book, Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times, a book she co-wrote with her journalist brother David Goodman.

She hit five of the 70 cities on her tour this past week – Taos, Santa Fe, Mesilla, Silver City and Albuquerque. On that final, big city stop on Monday — before heading off to Washington state — she recorded Democracy Now! at KNME’s studios from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m.

And you thought you had to get up early.

It was after that daily recording that she sat down with me for a wide-ranging, extremely thoughtful interview. Of course, those who’d disagree with her news judgment and interpretation of the news of the day – I suspect they’re mostly conservative-minded folks — may well describe her answers (and maybe my questions) differently.

You can watch the interview above, or on tonight’s broadcast on KNME at 7 p.m.

Predictably, the conversation kept returning to media matters — global, national and local — and Goodman has major multi-platform cred to weigh in knowledgeably on the full spectrum of media. She produces news for radio, TV (public broadcasters as well as satellite TV), newspapers and online too.  

According to her Web site, nearly 800 stations distribute her daily feed. But in a media landscape dotted by newspaper cutbacks and closings, Goodman emphasized the importance of something she calls community media.

“We need more media, not less,” she said. “It’s absolutely critical that there be community media. What I’m most concerned about with these newspapers closing is the lack of regional and local voices having an airing.”

About the rise of ideological news — FOX News and the Drudge Report on the right, MSNBC and Huffington Post on the left — I asked Goodman if she disagrees with those who say her slant on the news is clearly in the lefty camp. Her answer:

Yes I do. Because I think that conservative and liberal lines are breaking down. I’m for a robust discussion on the critical issues of the day, breaking the sound barrier. And there’s no more important issue that a country can be involved with than war… and that’s where we have to spend a lot of time, debating these issues. You know the media has covered wars less and less over time.

I was a bit surprised that Goodman wouldn’t embrace the progressive mantle. Her main point, though, seemed to be that the major, corporate-owned media outlets today shouldn’t be thought of as the often clichéd “mainstream media,” but rather “an extreme media beating the drums for war.” Like many, Goodman faults the so-called MM for avoiding a truly balanced discussion in the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“We need a media that covers power, not covers for power,” she said eloquently. “We need a media that is the fourth estate, not for the state.”

Paying for the news of the future — amid a sour economy and a newspaper industry in decline — is a problem, Goodman explained, for public broadcasters and, interestingly enough, nonprofit media to help solve. (NMI is a nonprofit site affiliated with the Center for Independent Media, which we briefly talked about at one point in the interview.)

I asked Goodman how she thinks local news will be funded in the future?

“I think the idea of listener, viewer reader sponsorship is a very important one,” Goodman offered, and she added, “nonprofit media profits us all.”

Goodman concluded the interview with what could easily pass for a stirring closing argument if journalism itself was on trial in some courtroom thriller.

Our role as journalists is to question, is to go to where the silence is. That’s our highest calling in the profession. Right now Barack Obama is president, and our job is to challenge and to hold those in power accountable. And that won’t change. 

Oh, and in a special bonus, check out this week’s second In Focus segment, featuring none other than NMI’s Gwyneth Doland and ex-NMIer and current founder of his own site Benito Aragon. Both give their own thoughtful takes on New Mexico’s local new media landscape and how it’s changing. Check that out below.