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For anyone that didn't catch it, Democracy Now's Amy Goodman was featured on C-SPAN's Book TV series, In Depth, this weekend and spoke to host Peter Slen for three hours about a wide range of topics, including her books Exception to the Rulers, Standing Up to the Madness, and The Silenced Majority.

During the opening of her interview, she discussed how Democracy Now first started broadcasting and their studio's proximity to the World Trade Center during the attacks on 9-11 and the importance of independent media in America where information is not brought to the viewers courtesy of corporate America.

You can watch the entire interview here at C-SPAN's web site. Lots and lots of really interesting and important topics were covered ranging from everything from how close she's come to being killed trying to cover genocide which the American media ignored due to our government's complicity in it being allowed to go on, among a host of other stories which her show has covered that the corporate media here in America ignores.

They discussed what the role of journalism should be in the United States, the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring, whistle blowers being prosecuted, Gitmo, and many more topics than I've got the time to mention here.

She took questions from viewers, most supportive, a few that sounded a little bit nuts and if you've got three hours to spare and are a fan of Goodman's, I don't think you'll be disappointed about making the time to watch the whole thing.

C-SPAN is generally pretty terrible about the number of right-wing authors who they have on the air as part of their Book TV series. It was nice to see the give this amount of air time to someone from the left for once. It doesn't happen that often on their network.

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Chris Hedges appeared last Sunday on C-SPAN's Book TV series, In Depth for a three hour interview which you can watch all of at their archives. Here's a portion from the beginning of the last hour where Hedges weighed in on Ron Paul and Libertarianism, the battle between the working class and the elites for democracy and on Oprah Winfrey and her role in the cultural and religious pursuit of personal wealth in America.

On Ron Paul and Libertarianism:

HEDGES: Ron Paul for me is sort of a funny guy. I mean, he says a lot of good stuff, but for me Libertarianism is sort of a preindustrial ideology. The idea that government should be so diminished... well, I mean, the problem is that government is anemic in the face of corporations like Exxon Mobil, City Bank and Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. And we need to find leverage by which these monopolies can be broken up and the power of these corporations can be curbed.

And so I think Ron Paul is pretty good in terms of empire, in terms of fiscal responsibility, in terms of Constitutional rights, but the core of his message, which is essentially to gut government is one that I think isn't going to do anything to diminish the power of the corporate state.

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David Brooks appeared on C-SPAN's In Depth segment as part of their series, Book TV this Sunday and par for the course, the viewers were treated to a big dose of David Brooks doing his best to whitewash and gloss over the extremism we see on the right and playing the “both sides” false equivalencies game by lumping together Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz.

I won't argue with anyone who doesn't care for both Schultz and Olbermann's sometimes bombastic style and the fact that both of them can resort to hyperbole when trying to get a point across or when either of them have their backsides up because they're upset about something.

But neither Keith Olbermann or Ed Schultz is a Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Ann Coulter because like their styles or not, they happen to keep the majority of their reporting based on something called facts. Unlike David Brooks who has built his career on trying to pretend that the Republican Party in any way, shape or form has the interest of the working class at heart and that they're doing anything other than looking out for the interests of the elite in the United States and trying to make their ideas palatable to people who should otherwise find them offensive.

Brooks was asked this question by one of their Twitter followers:

Does the inflammatory approach of the entertainment-style pundits like Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter hurt the conservative cause?

Here's how he responded.

BROOKS: I guess, you know, Keith Olbermann on the other side and some of the MSNBC folks. You know, I do a show, I do two shows on a regular basis. I do the Newshour with Jim Lehrer and Meet the Press. And there we have very good discussion that I'm proud to be a part of. I feel really good when I leave the sets of those shows. And we get pretty good ratings, in fact, quite good ratings. Better than a lot of those cable shows.

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From C-SPAN's in Depth on Book TV, author and documentary maker Michael Moore recalls his account of speaking out against the invasion of Iraq during the 2003 Academy Awards and the subsequent death threats he received, egged on by right wing radio and the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck for the year or two following the speech.

You can watch the entire three hour interview at C-SPAN's web site here.