Film Review: Steal This Story, Please! Refuses To Let Power Close The Door

★★★★★

Amy Goodman follows a Trump official through a climate conference, microphone extended, questions flowing. He keeps walking. She keeps asking. Eventually, he reaches a door he can close. Goodman continues addressing the other side.

It’s a funny, infuriating, and efficient introduction to a journalist whose career has involved refusing to accept that access belongs to power.

Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin open Steal This Story, Please! with this pursuit. Across 102 minutes, they show what happens when that persistence becomes an entire lifetime’s work. Goodman has reported through massacres, wars and the smoke of September 11. The door keeps closing. She keeps turning up.

This story has been relevant for decades. Corporate interests shaping the news did not arrive with Donald Trump, nor did the assumption that uncomfortable voices should remain outside. Goodman’s listener-supported journalism offers people a microphone when commercial broadcasters would prefer to quote their jailers, employers or occupiers.

The documentary’s arrival coincides with a judge blocking Trump’s exclusion of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House while litigation continues. Even corporate news organisations now need court protection to preserve access.

The film shows what happens when persistence becomes an entire lifetimes work Image supplied

The film’s criticism of commercial media makes that development especially chilling. How far has power moved when institutions already criticised for accommodating it are themselves shut out?

Deal and Lessin draw on decades of field recordings, studio broadcasts and personal archives. Editor Mona Davis makes the accumulation expose recurring relationships between money, government and violence. Different countries, familiar arrangements.

In East Timor, Goodman and Allan Nairn witnessed Indonesian soldiers massacre independence protesters. In Nigeria, her reporting investigated oil interests and repression. In North Dakota, cameras caught violence against Indigenous people resisting a pipeline. The geographical distance shrinks when corporate interests repeatedly receive armed protection, and communities receive the consequences.

These connections give the film its force. It refuses the comforting idea that brutality belongs somewhere else. Nor does Goodman treat people as illustrations for a thesis. Her insistence on letting them speak challenges a news culture that routinely substitutes authoritative commentary for lived experience.

Her broadcasts of death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal attracted opposition. Giving someone airtime does not require endorsing everything they have done. It requires recognising that imprisonment does not extinguish their humanity. As we gasp at the return of live-streamed firing squad executions and failed lethal injections, these scenes are especially timely.

The films overload conveys how much suffering continues without accountability Portrait courtesy Right Livelihood Wolfgang Schmidt

After September 11, toxic smoke drifted into the Democracy Now! workspace near Ground Zero. They continued broadcasting. Elsewhere, the film follows reporting on Iraq, Ukraine and Gaza. The cumulative impression is exhausting: she was there, again and again, when looking away would have been easier.

The film’s admiration is plain, but its strongest scenes do not depend on anyone announcing Goodman’s courage. They let us watch the work: remaining beside a person, following a question, continuing a broadcast. Her stubbornness becomes legible through action.

There are victories. Reporting helped bring pressure for cuts to American military assistance to Indonesia. Prisoners gained freedom; neglected stories reached wider audiences. Goodman’s invitation to other outlets supplies the title: steal the story. The important thing is that people hear it.

The film resists turning these achievements into proof that history inevitably improves. Individual wins coexist with entrenched power and a political trajectory that has repeatedly moved rightward. Goodman’s work offers evidence that intervention matters without promising that one journalist can reverse everything.

Her Jewish upbringing helps explain the habit of questioning. A rabbi who would not evade questions provided an early model. Another is the White Rose resistance, whose members distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets before the regime executed them. Their declaration, “We will not be silent”, becomes an ethic carried into her reporting.

Amy Goodman with directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin

Deal and Lessin also show that this ethic can be passed on. Journalists including Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous carry lessons from Democracy Now! into their own work. The portrait becomes less solitary as the film reveals how an example produces others willing to ask.

If there is a reservation, it is the breadth. Some episodes deserve longer than this crowded film can give them. Moving between crises leaves little time to absorb one before another arrives. Yet the overload also conveys the scale of Goodman’s career and how much suffering continues without accountability.

What stays with you is that closed door. Speaking cannot always alter an outcome. You asked, witnessed and did what you could. That matters to your conscience, and perhaps to somebody listening nearby.

Goodman cannot make the official answer. She can make his refusal visible. Somebody else might carry the question further, broadcast the footage or steal the story. This stirring documentary asks us to recognise that possibility before deciding persistence is pointless.

Steal This Story, Please! opens nationally on 22 October 2026. See city specific opening dates below.

Enter our competition to win an in-season double pass to the film in Australia here.

The film is also having limited screenings at Adelaide Film Festival. Book tickets here.

Website: https://stealthisstory.org/

Socials: https://www.instagram.com/stealthisstoryplease/