by LISA MULLENNEAUX
‘Steal This Story, Please!’ is a call-to-action for independent media.
A defining moment in Steal This Story, Please!, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s portrait of the journalist and Democracy Now! founder Amy Goodman, comes midway through the film. It’s Election Day in November 2000, and then-President Bill Clinton telephones Pacifica radio station WBAI in New York City with an ask: Can he share a “get out the vote message” with her audience? Seizing her moment, Goodman says yes, then grills him on air for nearly thirty minutes. Clinton accuses her of being combative and adversarial, but it’s clear who’s in charge.
It’s also clear that Goodman relishes being a thorn in the side of “business as usual” bigwigs. Whereas some journalists would see Clinton’s surprise call as a chance to ingratiate themselves with the most powerful man in America, she uses it to pose the questions others are afraid to ask, such as Clinton’s taking his party “to the right” or that NAFTA was “pushed through” with false promises. That tenacity and fearlessness makes her a unicorn among reporters muzzled by corporate media. In addition to offering a comprehensive look at the events that have shaped her forty-year career, Steal This Story, Please! is also a call to action for people to seek out and support independent news outlets.
After graduating college, Goodman applies for a job at The Phil Donahue Show, but instead joins the news department at WBAI radio in New York City and later travels to East Timor in 1991 to cover the ongoing Indonesian occupation there. Why would Americans need to know about East Timor’s independence movement? Because their tax dollars helped arm and train the Indonesian forces that killed one-third of East Timor’s population over a period of seventeen years—a violent campaign that went largely unreported due to heavy restrictions on media and repression by the Indonesian government. Into this explosive setting, Goodman arrives with her colleague Allan Nairn, and they quickly end up running for their lives at a pro-independence demonstration that becomes a massacre. Steal This Story, Please! includes the now-infamous footage by BBC correspondent Max Stahl that served as a wake-up call to the world. “It’s a day I’ll remember for the rest of my life,” admits Goodman, who, like Nairn, was beaten by Indonesian soldiers. The U.S. government’s collusion with Indonesia against East Timor’s independence, she says, “taught me how critical it is to expose what is done in our name.”
Goodman is a reporter with good running shoes, and she’s proven she will risk anything for a story. In the film’s opening sequence, we see her pursuing P. Wells Griffith III, a Trump policy advisor on climate change, up stairs and through crowded halls at the 2018 U.N. Climate Summit in Poland. He refuses to comment or set up an interview, and eventually shuts a door in her face. When he accuses her of “harassment,” she throws back, “a reporter asking a question, sir, is not harassment.”
But Goodman isn’t just a reporter; she’s a reporter with a mission. She co-founded her WBAI radio show Democracy Now! in 1996, she explains in the film, to “bring out the voices of people who are not usually heard.” Those voices include Moreese Bickham, a Black man from Louisiana Klan country who was wrongfully convicted of a double-homocide and sentenced to death in 1958. After journalist David Isay’s efforts to get the prisoner released fail, he turns to his colleague Goodman and uses her morning show to plead Bickham’s case. “[Governor Edwin Edwards] was getting so many calls from WBAI listeners,” says Isay, “they had to change his phone number.” In video footage from 1996, we see Goodman and Isay welcome Bickham to the WBAI studios in Manhattan after Edwards has been forced to commute Bickham’s sentence. He had served thirty-seven years.
Another example of Pacifica Radio’s advocacy was the decision in 1997 to air commentaries “From Death Row” by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Pennsylvania journalist who was sentenced to death for murder in 1982. The idea for the series, Goodman explains, was NPR’s, but it cancelled its planned programming after pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police. She picked up the baton and what WBAI’s audience heard was eye-opening testimony about the nation’s prisons as “social sinkholes of despair,” (in Abu-Jamal’s words). Twelve public radio stations in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey canceled Goodman’s show and for a time its viability was in question. Abu-Jamal remains imprisoned after decades of legal battles.
“Democracy Now!’s strength and singularity,” says Goodman’s current co-host Nermeen Shaikh in the film, “is speaking with people who have no platform. Most media exclude those voices from the frame. We expand the frame, and not just expand it, we center those voices.” Like others interviewed for Steal This Story, Please!, Shaikh explains that Goodman’s fearlessness inspired confidence in a media novice whose audition for the show was live. “I had never been in front of a camera, never read a prompter before I went on air,” she says. “I felt completely terrified, but during the breaks Amy told me I was doing a great job.”
That kind of self-confidence impressed Jeremy Scahill, who was living and working at the Catholic Worker House in New York City when Goodman hired him in 1996. “I had imagined an entire newsroom of people working to create what I listened to every morning—it was that good. Then it turns out it’s just her,” he explains in the film. Scahill later went on to co-found The Intercept and Drop Site News.
Similarly, journalist Juan Gonzáles was reporting for The New York Daily News when he joined Goodman as co-host that same year because he needed to reach a different audience. After 9/11, his reports on the dangerous air quality at Ground Zero were read on air by Goodman, whose team never left their offices in lower Manhattan. “The only thing I got wrong,” says Gonzáles, “was that it didn’t take twenty years for people to die. It took five years.”
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