Juan González is an American progressive broadcast journalist and investigative reporter. He was also a columnist for the New York Daily News from 1987 to 2016. He frequently co-hosts the radio and television program Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.

González was born on October 15, 1947, in Ponce, Puerto Rico to Juan González, who was a veteran of the Puerto Rican 65th Infantry during World War II, and Florinda Rivera de González. González was raised in East Harlem and Brooklyn. After a period as editor of his high school newspaper, the Lane Reporter, González attended Columbia College and graduated in the mid-1960s.

At Columbia College, he was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and played a leading role in the protests that shut down the college in spring 1968 as one of three “Strike Central” representatives on the strike coordinating committee. In the student strike that followed, the police riot that ended the occupation he continued in this role and in negotiations at the apartment of Eugene Galanter. He was a member of Students for a Democratic Society and a founding member of the New York City branch of the Young Lords, serving on its first central committee as its Minister of Education.

In 1981, he was elected president of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights, a political organization that concentrated on registering Latino voters.

González is former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, for which he created the Parity Project, an innovative program designed to help news organizations recruit and retain Hispanic reporters and managers. In 2008, The National Association of Hispanic Journalists inducted González into the organization's Hall of Fame. In addition, he has been named by Hispanic Business Magazine as one of America's most influential Hispanics, as well as earning a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hispanic Academy of Media Arts and Sciences. For two years, González was the Belle Zeller Visiting Professor in Public Policy and Administration at Brooklyn College/CUNY, with an appointment in both the Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, as well as the Political Science Department.

González has written extensively on the health effects arising from the September 11 attacks and the cover-up of Ground Zero air hazards in columns in the New York Daily News. He was the first reporter in New York City to write on the health effects arising from the September 11, 2001 attacks.

González was awarded the 2010 Justice in Action Award from the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and, in 2011, won the George Polk Award a second time for a series of columns in the New York Daily News which exposed criminal acts connected with then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s CityTime project, a new computerized payroll system, leading to the federal indictment of four consultancies for fraud.

In 2015, the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists inducted González into its New York Journalism Hall of Fame, along with Max Frankel, Charlie Rose, Lesley Stahl, Paul Steiger, and Richard Stolley.

Since 2018, he has held the post of Professor of Professional Practice at Rutgers University-New Brunswick's School of Communication and Information.

González has written four books: Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse (2002; ISBN 1-56584-845-4), document cover-ups by Environmental Protection Agency and government officials with regard to health hazards at Ground Zero in New York; Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (2009, 2011, 2022); Roll Down Your Window: Stories of a Forgotten America; Reclaiming Gotham: Bill de Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities (2017).

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Gonz%C3%A1lez_(journalist)