The craft of boots-on-the-ground journalism – going to where a story is happening, talking to people despite the physical and emotional risk and reporting the facts – is in decline, a victim of podcasting, opinionating, shrinking news budgets and intimidation by a certain orange-skinned president.
Telling the truth was always hard, but it’s harder than ever today.
Which is why the new documentary about progressive journalist Amy Goodman, “Steal This Story, Please!,” is a window into old school, shoe leather (she probably doesn’t wear leather) journalism that has led her deep into building a left-wing audience that no doubt makes MAGA insane.
Documentarians and longtime partners Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (“Citizen Koch,” “Fahrenheit 9/11”) confessed that they made the film about Goodman, a friend and colleague, in part to cope with their concern about the decline of press freedom in general and independent journalism in particular.
“We were looking for ways to deal with the insanity in the world,” said Deal from Telluride, where he and Lessin are showing the film. “We were drawn to Amy’s story. The way she’s been working over the last three decades is validated in the way that the media is capitulating to power.”
Said Lessin: “This gave us a purpose in these dark, dark times, to talk about it and make it make sense about what’s happening with Trump.”
Lessin, Deal and Goodman are fellow travelers in the rough and tumble world of independent journalism and documentaries. Deal and Lessin worked closely with firebrand Michael Moore on “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 11/9,” films that stand the test of time in highlighting critical social issues, from gun control to climate change.
Goodman’s broadcast “Democracy Now” has been on the air for 29 years, but she has been a fierce advocate for the poor, the powerless, the marginalized, the forgotten people in distant war zones for even longer.
Starting from her early aspiration to be the new Phil Donahue, Goodman experienced a life-altering trauma when she went to East Timor in the early 1990s and was present for a massacre of civilian East Timorese by Indonesian government soldiers.
She emerged with a fierce determination to expose inequities where she saw them and to be independent in her journalism, to steer clear of the sought-after star turns on “60 Minutes” or broadcast network news and instead hew her own, nearly one-woman path through the dangerous jungle of news. Goodman takes no sponsorship money and has no deals with what she calls “corporate media;” instead she is fully supported by individual subscribers.
In her years wielding a microphone, she’s covered the White House, multiple wars, the Standing Rock protests against an oil pipeline, street protests and police raids. She goes fearlessly into the field when it’s never been more dangerous for journalists to do exactly that. And while many would call her an advocate for the left, Lessin and Deal argue that if Goodman is an advocate, she is an advocate for her values, and the truth.
“The word advocacy has been used to dismiss independent journalists like Amy Goodman,” said Lessin. “How about the advocacy commercial networks showed during invasion of Iraq? The guests on the shows were generals, advocating for the war. They didn’t have equal time for peace activists.”
Said Deal: “Advocacy is a tricky word, because there’s some motivation behind what you’re advocating for, or who you’re advocating for, or why you’re advocating for anything. What distinguishes what Amy and ‘Democracy Now’ do is they’re not serving power. They are listening to people.
“When you make a documentary, hopefully you’re learning something. You don’t go in there with a preconceived idea. And it may seem really simple, but for me, it was really profound seeing Amy time and time again, especially in these last 12 months on the ground at protests, talking to people,” Deal continued. “She’s not there participating in the protest, but she’s putting a microphone in front of people and asking them the really simple but obvious question that other people don’t: why are you here?”
Nowadays there are lots of “independent” journalists, individuals who have left or been exited from legacy media and can be found on Substack, YouTube and TikTok. Certainly Goodman was a trailblazer in that regard.
But the more significant distinction, it seems to me, is her willingness to always go out and expose the facts, convenient or otherwise.
“Steal This Story, Please!” is playing at Telluride and is seeking distribution.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story said Goodman covered the East Timor situation in the 1970s. The story has been corrected. TheWrap regrets the error.
