The Indie News Queen Who’s Not Done Pissing Off the Powerful

In the opening country of the caller documentary Steal This Story, Please! newsman Amy Goodman chases down a elder Trump medication adviser.

The camera follows arsenic she weaves done a normal hallway astatine a clime league successful Poland, shouting questions astatine vigor adept P. Wells Griffith III close up until helium shuts a doorway successful her face. Undaunted, she waits outside. The doorway opens a crack. It’s immoderate lackey, peeping retired and shooing her away; close up until the doorway closes again, Goodman persists, trying to marque contact. She’s retired of enactment erstwhile she yet turns back.

Goodman, the indefatigable longtime big and cofounder of the autarkic journalism stalwart Democracy Now!, has spent the past 30 years asking her subjects pugnacious questions, starring radical similar erstwhile US president Bill Clinton to picture her arsenic “hostile and combative” and intimidating authorities officials truthful overmuch that they fly connected sight.

Steal This Story, Please! traces Democracy Now!’s emergence from an upstart airing connected a fewer handfuls of nationalist vigor stations to … the nonstop aforesaid thing, conscionable distributed connected thousands of vigor and tv stations arsenic good arsenic the internet.

Democracy Now! is simply a uncommon media occurrence communicative wherever an outlet has flourished by sticking to its archetypal vision—it has ever been a proudly grassroots endeavor that shuns firm sponsorship and embraces sum of societal movements. It has besides ever been led by Goodman, 68, whose ascent to progressive icon is documented successful parallel to the outlet’s growth.

Steal This Story, Please!, directed by Oscar-nominated filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal and successful theaters Friday, casts an affectionate oculus connected its subject—this is nary searing exposé—but it inactive thrusts Goodman into an unfamiliar position, wherever she’s the idiosyncratic answering questions alternatively than asking them. “It’s painful,” Goodman tells WIRED. “A sensation of my ain medicine.”

She was much than blessed to woody with the discomfort, though, arsenic she sees the task arsenic a mode to dispersed the connection astir the necessity of autarkic journalism. She sees the documentary’s sanction arsenic a call-to-action of her journalistic ethics: “We spot an exclusive communicative arsenic a failure.” In an epoch erstwhile media executives thin toward skittishness, Goodman hopes that the occurrence of her outlet demonstrates that determination is, indeed, an appetite for sum that is adversarial to powerfulness and focused connected community-driven movements astir the world.

Steal This Story, Please! is fundamentally a item reel of Democracy Now!’s reportage, from its aboriginal enactment covering a genocide successful East Timor, wherever Goodman was beaten by occupying Indonesian soldiers, to its on-the-ground reporting connected the 9/11 attacks, to its crusading reporting connected the protestation movements successful Standing Rock, close up to its vigilant documentation of unit successful Gaza. The movie makes it abundantly wide that 1 of the secrets to the program’s occurrence is its absorption connected planetary societal movements and speaking with the radical straight progressive successful them. “We don't judge successful turning to the pundits, who cognize truthful small astir truthful much,” says Goodman. Instead, the outlet focuses connected what Goodman calls “trickle-up journalism,” wherever it privileges interviews with activists, mundane people, and subject-matter experts. “I deliberation it’s that authentic dependable that drives radical to enactment Democracy Now!”

Today, arsenic the mainstream media declines and smaller, autarkic outings proliferate connected platforms similar Substack and TikTok, the audience-supported exemplary Democracy Now! relies connected has go acold much prevalent. Goodman isn’t disquieted astir lagging enactment successful an epoch wherever an expanding fig of indie outlets trust connected scholar oregon spectator donations oregon subscriptions to enactment afloat, though. “We haven’t had an issue,” she says. “One of the engines of our maturation has been nary paywall.”