'Steal This Story, Please' Profiles Amy Goodman
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- "Steal This Story, Please!" is a new documentary directed and produced by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, profiling Amy Goodman, 69, and her approach to journalism built on the principle that "an exclusive is a failure."
- Democracy Now!, the hour-long daily broadcast Goodman founded, airs on public stations across the US, Canada, and worldwide, funded entirely by viewer donations and rejecting advertising, sponsorship, and government grants.
- The documentary opens with Goodman pursuing P Wells Griffith III, then Donald Trump's climate adviser — who had no prior energy industry experience — at the 2018 COP climate summit in Katowice, Poland, where Griffith hid in the US delegation suite to dodge her questions.
- The 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in Dili, East Timor, where Indonesian soldiers armed with US M16 rifles killed 271 protesters, anchors the film; Goodman and co-reporter Allan Nairn survived but were beaten with rifle butts, fracturing Nairn's skull.
- Secretly filmed footage of the massacre by journalist Max Stahl gradually made the Indonesian occupation untenable, leading to a 1999 referendum in which 78.5% voted for independence and the founding of Timor-Leste in 2002.
- Democracy Now! recently marked 30 years with an event at Riverside Church in New York — the same venue where Martin Luther King delivered his April 1967 speech linking "militarism, materialism and racism" — with appearances by Angela Davis, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Stipe.
Why it matters: Goodman's stated ethos — "talking to people at the target end" of war and policy — is positioned in the film against corporate media "brought to you by the weapons manufacturers" and fossil-fuel advertisers. The documentary lands amid accelerating American news consolidation, making the viewer-funded, ad-free Democracy Now! model and Goodman's 40-year track record a pointed counterexample, while Stahl's footage of the Dili massacre is credited as catalytic for Timor-Leste's eventual independence.
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