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

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

Early on in this stirring, unashamedly admiring documentary portrait of veteran US broadcast journalist and investigative reporter Amy Goodman, we see her being interviewed by a smooth Fox News anchor. “You’re an activist and a journalist… you say you can do both?” he asks. Goodman’s weary smile is all the reply we get before the film moves on to the next item in a views-of-Goodman montage. Two things become clear during the film, which traces the 40-year arc of Goodman’s journalistic career: that Goodman would never ask such an obvious, loaded question; and that maybe you can do both.

Stirring, unashamedly admiring documentary portrait

Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal are no strangers to documentaries that address social and political issues. They produced several Michael Moore films before moving behind the camera, beginning with the Oscar-nominated Hurricane Katrina documentary Trouble the Water in 2008 and including the The Janes (2022). Steal This Story, Please! plays IDFA’s frontlight strand after premiering at DC/DOX in June – close to the centre of establishment power that Goodman and her Democracy Now! radio, TV and Internet news programme have been holding to account for the last 30 years – and playing Telluride. At a time when journalism itself is under scrutiny, the documentary’s chaotic energy and relentless forward drive should help it garner further attention, likely from a streamer or broadcaster.

Goodman’s dedication to her job is established in an early sequence that shows the reporter, microphone in hand, running up and down stairs in pursuit of a climate policy advisor to President Trump at a UN climate summit while bombarding him with questions. The pace barely lets up from here on in. Deftly edited by Mona Davis, Steal This Story Please! is structured as a series of wave surges that break around some of the key stories Goodman has covered in her career, from her part in the WBAI radio station campaign to release death-row prisoner Moreese Bickham from Angola State Penitentiary in 1996, through to her coverage of the Jewish Voice for Peace protest at New York’s Grand Central Station in November 2023.

Democracy Now! was founded in 1996 with a remit to ’bring out the voices of people who are not usually heard’, as Goodman explains here. Those voices are often from parts of the world that have been ignored by mainstream US media – like Nigeria in the 1990s, where US-based oil companies colluded with the military regime to repress dissent, or East Timor, where Goodman and a New York Times colleague were beaten by Indonesian security forces while attending an independence rally which turned into a massacre.

Steal This Story, Please! – a title taken from Goodman’s stated belief that worthy news stories should be shared and amplified – builds a convincing case for the ability of dogged, courageous reporting to mobilise pressure against injustice and effect change (a theme shared by Mark Obenhaus and Laura Poitras’s recent Cover-Up, focusing on political journalist Seymour Hersh).  It also criticizes the modern tendency of many news sources to let themselves get embedded – with the US army in Iraq, the IDF in Palestine, or the powers that be anywhere.

The lulls between story crescendos are filled with interviews with colleagues and Goodman herself, together with home videos, photos, and glimpses of the reporter (and her dog Zazu) in what feel like rare moments of downtime – including a visit to a snowy cemetery in Ukraine where several of her Jewish relatives, victims of the Holocaust, lie buried. Goodman emerges as a passionate advocacy journalist but also a well-navigated professional who is wise to the tricks of the trade and prepared to use them.

She clearly also relishes her role as a thorn in the side – something that comes across in filmed footage of a radio interview with Bill Clinton on Election Day in 2000, when a five-minute call-in turned into a thirty-minute grilling. Clinton sounds exasperated but, rising to the challenge of Goodman’s adversarial technique, stays on the phone – in stark contrast, this rousing, urgent documentary points out, to the approach to critical reporting of the current White House.