Review: 'Steal This Story, Please!' shows firebrand journalist Amy Goodman's work and her drive to tell stories other media won't
I suspect that a lot of journalists, if you gave them truth serum, would say they want to be like Amy Goodman, the fearlessly in-your-face reporter and host of “Democracy Now!,” where she frequently speaks truth to power and goes places the mainstream media won’t go to interview the most disadvantaged people on Earth.
Goodman’s career, and the origins of her hard-charging personality, are given their due in “Steal This Story, Please!,” a documentary that follows her attempts to get the powerful to speak the truth and to give attention to the voiceless.
Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (“Trouble the Water”) show us Goodman’s no-compromise style with the opening scene, as she follows one of Donald Trump’s climate advisers through a 2018 global environmental summit. She peppers the guy, P. Wells Griffith III, with questions, and he stays silent. He tells Goodman to call his office to make an appointment, and she asks him for a business card so she can make that call. When he ducks into the U.S. delegation’s office, an aide blocks her — and then refuses to give her the business card Griffith said he’d give her.
Goodman started her journalism career at New York’s independent radio station, WBAI, learning how to work a mic and edit tape as she went. She was a fast editor; a colleague describes how she did an interview only minutes before airtime, then started editing — and played the first half while she still edited the second half.
The story that made Goodman nationally famous was her coverage, with The New Yorker’s freelancer Allan Naim, of a 1991 massacre of East Timorese independence protesters at the hands of the Indonesian military. The Indonesian forces beat Goodman and severely injured Naim, but they got out with the story — highlighting how the Indonesians’ weapons were supplied by the U.S. government, under both Republican and Democratic presidents. The footage got used by U.S. media, and brought the plight of the Timorese to the world’s attention.
Both at WBAI and, since 1996, on the nationally distributed Pacifica Radio, Goodman has covered stories other media wouldn’t touch:
• Her interviews Moreese Bickham, a wrongfully convicted prisoner in the Louisiana State Prison, and got him freed.
• She aired the prison reports of Mumia Abu-Jamal, on Pennsylvania’s Death Row for his role in killing a cop.
• On 9/11, she and her crew stayed in their studios, a renovated former firehouse a few blocks from the World Trade Center, and experienced the toxic dust from Ground Zero.
• She got arrested covering protesters at the 2008 Republican Convention in Minnesota.
• She told the world about the Native Americans protesting the Dakota Access pipeline.
The through line of Goodman’s work has been talking to the people outside, the ones on the ground being affected by what the people in power were doing. Sometimes, but not often enough, telling those stories got those powerful people to change their minds.
“Steal This Story, Please!” showcases Goodman’s work, and her philosophy that any journalist could do what she does, if they want to stand up to their corporate bosses.
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‘Steal This Story, Please!’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, May 22, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for war violence and language. Running time: 102 minutes.