‘Steal This Story, Please!’ review: Energetic doc follows dogged US journalist Amy Goodman

Dirs: Carl Deal, Tia Lessin. USA. 2025. 101mins

Early on on this stirring, unashamedly admiring documentary portrait of veteran US broadcast journalist and investigative reporter Amy Goodman, we see her being interviewed by a clean Fox Information anchor. “You’re an activist and a journalist… you say you are able to do each?” he asks. Goodman’s weary smile is all of the reply we get earlier than the movie strikes on to the following merchandise in a views-of-Goodman montage. Two issues grow to be clear throughout the movie, which traces the 40-year arc of Goodman’s journalistic profession: that Goodman would by no means ask such an apparent, loaded query; and that perhaps you can do each.

Stirring, unashamedly admiring documentary portrait

Administrators Tia Lessin and Carl Deal are not any strangers to documentaries that handle social and political points. They produced a number of Michael Moore movies earlier than shifting behind the digicam, starting with the Oscar-nominated Hurricane Katrina documentary Hassle the Water in 2008 and together with the The Janes (2022). Steal This Story, Please! performs IDFA’s frontlight strand after premiering at DC/DOX in June – near the centre of firm energy that Goodman and her Democracy Now! radio, TV and Web information programme have been holding to account for the final 30 years – and taking part in Telluride. At a time when journalism itself is beneath scrutiny, the documentary’s chaotic power and relentless ahead drive ought to assist it garner additional consideration, doubtless from a streamer or broadcaster.

Goodman’s dedication to her job is established in an early sequence that reveals the reporter, microphone in hand, operating up and down stairs in pursuit of a local weather coverage advisor to President Trump at a UN local weather summit whereas bombarding him with questions. The tempo barely lets up from right here on in. Deftly edited by Mona Davis, Steal This Story Please! is structured as a collection of wave surges that break round a number of the key tales Goodman has lined in her profession, from her half within the WBAI radio station marketing campaign to launch death-row prisoner Moreese Bickham from Angola State Penitentiary in 1996, by means of to her protection of the Jewish Voice for Peace protest at New York’s Grand Central Station in November 2023.

Democracy Now! was based in 1996 with a remit to ’carry out the voices of people who find themselves not normally heard’, as Goodman explains right here. These voices are sometimes from components of the world which were ignored by mainstream US media – like Nigeria within the Nineties, the place US-based oil corporations colluded with the army regime to repress dissent, or East Timor, the place Goodman and a New York Instances colleague have been crushed by Indonesian safety forces whereas attending an independence rally which changed into a bloodbath.

Steal This Story, Please! – a title taken from Goodman’s acknowledged perception that worthy information tales needs to be shared and amplified – builds a convincing case for the power of dogged, brave reporting to mobilise strain towards injustice and impact change (a theme shared by Mark Obenhaus and Laura Poitras’s current Cowl-Up, specializing in political journalist Seymour Hersh).  It additionally criticizes the fashionable tendency of many information sources to let themselves get embedded – with the US military in Iraq, the IDF in Palestine, or the powers that be wherever.

The lulls between story crescendos are crammed with interviews with colleagues and Goodman herself, along with residence movies, pictures, and glimpses of the reporter (and her canine Zazu) in what really feel like uncommon moments of downtime – together with a go to to a snowy cemetery in Ukraine the place a number of of her Jewish family members, victims of the Holocaust, lie buried. Goodman emerges as a passionate advocacy journalist but in addition a well-navigated skilled who is smart to the methods of the commerce and ready to make use of them.

She clearly additionally relishes her position as a thorn within the facet – one thing that comes throughout in filmed footage of a radio interview with Invoice Clinton on Election Day in 2000, when a five-minute call-in changed into a thirty-minute grilling. Clinton sounds exasperated however, rising to the problem of Goodman’s adversarial approach, stays on the cellphone – in stark distinction, this rousing, pressing documentary factors out, to the strategy to vital reporting of the present White Home.