“Hi, I’m Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!. Can you tell us what you think about President Trump saying that climate change is a Chinese hoax?”

“I’m sorry, I’m running late for a meeting,” replies a well-dressed man in a bustling room at the 2018 U.N. Climate Summit in Poland (COP24). 

“Right, but you weren’t running late when you were just standing there,” Goodman replies. 

The man Goodman is talking to is Wells Griffith — then Special Assistant to  President Donald Trump/Senior Director for Energy and Environment — who, minutes after defending America’s fossil fuel agenda, finds himself being followed down a corridor by Goodman, microphone extended, questions multiplying. He walks, then speed-walks away from Goodman, until a door is shut in her face. She waits outside.

This is the opening scene of Steal This Story, Please!, the new documentary by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin about the life and legacy of Democracy Now! co-founder and host, and award-winning investigative journalist and author, Amy Goodman. The film chronicles her impressively dedicated career, the trajectory of the daily radio broadcast and online publication Democracy Now!, and the power and necessity of independent media. 

Steal This Story, Please! opened at the Independent Film Company (IFC) Center on April 10. The screenings were paired with Q&A sessions from Amy Goodman, the directors, and guest moderators like actors Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal. These screenings all sold out, inspiring IFC to keep adding more screenings and Q&As. 

Steal This Story, Please! shows that Amy Goodman is unlike any other journalist. 

Born in Bay Shore, New York, to Jewish parents George and Dorothy Goodman, Amy Goodman was exposed at an early age to issues of social justice. Her parents were active in social action groups and peace movements. The film shares that Amy Goodman’s father was a physician who also worked on racial integration in schools, and that her mother was a social worker. Following in her parents’ footsteps, Amy Goodman spent much of her time at Radcliffe College at Harvard University protesting the apartheid in South Africa, while also pursuing a degree in anthropology. 

Amy Goodman is famously guarded, and Deal and Lessin seem to know it, deploying the intimate details in the film carefully: a childhood family newspaper she made with her brother, David, which covered everything from household news to the Vietnam War, and a visit with her 106-year-old grandmother, who complained that Amy hadn’t brushed her hair. These moments don’t soften Goodman so much as locate her — they explain where her curiosity and determination come from.

“It came from my Jewish education that you asked questions and that you take nothing for granted … And the way you deal with the world is with intense curiosity and not being afraid to stand by your principles,” Goodman said in the documentary.

Goodman is best known for her work as a Democracy Now! host. The broadcast program launched in 1996 at WBAI radio and has grown into a daily, global independent news program withmillions of listeners worldwide. It is audience-supported, “which means that [its] editorial independence is never compromised by corporate or government interests,” the website reads. Since its founding, Democracy Now! has not accepted any federal funding, corporate sponsorship, or advertising revenue. 

The title of the documentary, Steal This Story, Please!, is a directive to amplify silenced voices. Goodman wants people to hear from diverse perspectives telling their stories themselves, and wants more media to cover them.

The film highlights the types of stories Democracy Now! covers and the key moments of Goodman’s decades-spanning career in journalism. It chronicles her start at WBAI radio and the key political movements she’s covered since, like Chevron’s role in the killing of two Nigerian activists in 1998, and the 1991 East Timor massacre, where more than 270 people were killed, and Goodman and fellow journalist Allan Nairn were badly beaten and threatened with guns to their heads, as recounted by the two in their documentary on the atrocity. 

Steal This Story, Please! also highlights Goodman’s reporting of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. Goodman has said she still regularly coughs because of her exposure to the toxic air from staying in the 9/11 evacuation zone for multiple days, hiding out in the original Democracy Now! studio. 

The documentary tells of when Goodman was issued an arrest warrant for covering the Standing Rock oil pipeline protests in 2016, as well as her ongoing reporting on the current genocide in Gaza. Goodman has been beaten, arrested, and threatened by governments and corporations, and the documentary illustrates that her priority continues to be to keep the tape rolling and to get the truth out there, no matter the risk. 

That message extends beyond Goodman herself. One of the film’s quieter revelations is how much Democracy Now! has functioned as a training ground — a place where a different kind of journalism is modeled, practiced, and passed on. 

“Independent media is essential to the functioning of a democratic society,” Goodman said in an interview with Wired. “We have to fight for it. We have to stand up for it. We have to make the country safe for dissent.”

According to the film, independent media doesn’t just cover communities, it generates one. 

Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, who went on to co-found both The Intercept and Drop Site News, got his start at Democracy Now!. Co-hosts Juan González, a  co-founder of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and Nermeen Shaikh, author and senior producer at Democracy Now!, have built their own bodies of work in the news organization’s orbit. 

When asked by the New School Free Press about what advice she has for early-career journalists still in school, Goodman didn’t hold back. “We have to be a check on those in power, and there’s no more important time than now.” 

She continued by saying, “We have to have outlets that are fair, that are accurate, that you can trust in, [like] democracynow.org. Going there, you find all these different media outlets and places you can turn to around the world. And I always say, you can start there, but do it. Become a journalist, or simply be an aware, vigilant citizen of the world.” 

Steal This Story, Please! is showing at IFC (a 15-minute walk away from the New School’s University Center). Tickets can be found here.