Amy Goodman vs. President Clinton

The story that I'm going to tell you is based on what I watched on Democracy Now!. This channel is not that popular and to the best of my knowledge it has a one-hour TV program most of the days. Amy Goodman is the host of this channel. On the day of Election 2000 just a few minutes before Amy Goodman starts her daily show at 9 a.m. she gets a call. The caller says "I'm calling from the White House"!! The caller says that President is going to talk to Amy. She replies "President of what?!". The caller says "The President of the United States"! President Clinton is going to talk to Amy. He wants to encourage people to vote. Since this channel is a sort of independent which, I assume, supported Nader it seems to me that Clinton wanted to highlight the differences between Republicans and Democrats and encourage independent voters to vote for Al-Gore. Of course they knew that this would be a tight election. Amy rushes to the studio and starts the program. She interviews President Clinton. She asks tough questions. She asks variety of questions from him. At some point Clinton accuses her of being "combative and hostile". In return she calls her questions critical. The day after that show someone from White House calls Amy and tells her why she broke "the ground rules" of the interview! "What ground rules?" Amy says. She says that they didn't agree on any sort of ground rules and she wouldn't agree on any. Amy says that she believes she shouldn't trade her principles for access and this is the only ground rule she accepts. The caller threatens her of banning her from the White House! Amy says that she didn't have any that she could lose it! The caller says she was supposed to interview Clinton just for a few minutes and he was just willing to take out the votes. Amy says that Clinton is the most powerful man in the world, he can hang up if he wants!

You can watch the interview and read the transcript of the interview here.