‘They slammed their M16s against his skull’: inside the film about Amy Goodman’s fearless reporting

As Steal This Story, Please! charts her astonishing reports on everything from climate summits to earthquakes to massacres, Goodman talks about dissent, censorship – and her ‘magic moments’ ‘I consider an exclusive a failure,” Amy Goodman says. It is not a typical observation for a journalist to make, but it is the approach at the heart of a documentary about her career, Steal This Story, Please! If an article, item, narrative or interview is significant enough “it should be shared around the world,” she insists. This time, however, her goal is not to share a particular news story, but rather an entire professional philosophy. To do so, Goodman had to let “two Oscar-nominated stalkers into my life” in an effort to “spread the word about this critical form of independent journalism” that she has practised over four decades. In an era of the behemothisation of American news, endless mergers and mega-mergers, Goodman, 69, has successfully operated off-road, working first in community radio, then creating New York based Democracy Now!, an hour-long daily news broadcast aired online and on public stations in the US, Canada and around the world. A core idea, she exp