‘They slammed their M16s against his skull’: inside the film about Amy Goodman’s fearless reporting
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- 'Steal This Story, Please!', directed and produced by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, profiles Amy Goodman, 69, across her four-decade career in independent journalism, with Goodman embarking on a UK screening and appearance tour ahead of the film's wider release.
- Democracy Now! — the hour-long daily broadcast Goodman founded and co-hosts with Juan González — recently celebrated 30 years at New York's Riverside Church, where guests including Angela Davis, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Stipe performed; the same church where Martin Luther King denounced the Vietnam War in April 1967.
- The documentary opens with Goodman confronting P Wells Griffith III, then Donald Trump's climate adviser, at the 2018 COP summit in Katowice, Poland — where Griffith, who had no prior energy industry experience, was sent to praise coal mining and ultimately fled to the US delegation suite to avoid her microphone.
- The film's centerpiece is the November 12, 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in Dili, East Timor: Goodman and journalist Allan Nairn were beaten by Indonesian soldiers who "slammed" their US-supplied M16s against Nairn's skull, fracturing it, while 271 protesters were killed — a story the world's media then "stolen" after Goodman recounted it in press interviews.
- Secret footage of the massacre, shot by journalist Max Stahl, later made the Indonesian occupation untenable; 78.5% of East Timorese voted for independence in a 1999 referendum, and the nation of Timor-Leste was formally established three years later.
- Goodman's editorial philosophy explicitly rejects scoops — "I consider an exclusive a failure" — and centers on "talking to people at the target end," funded entirely by viewer donations with no advertising, corporate sponsorship, or government grants, a structure she contrasts with network reporters who "go into a tank" during wars rather than to those being bombed.
Why it matters: The documentary crystallizes a viewer-funded model that explicitly refuses advertising from weapons manufacturers and oil companies, positioning Democracy Now! as a 30-year counterweight to corporate media consolidation. The Dili segment demonstrates that independent reporting — paired with Max Stahl's covertly filmed footage — can move geopolitics: East Timor's 1999 independence vote followed years of coverage the mainstream US press had largely ignored.
