Amy Goodman travels to places many of us are afraid to venture. She walked the chemical-dust-clouded streets of Lower Manhattan during the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, searching for survivors and examining the damage. She also visited the North Dakota scene of Native American protests against an oil pipeline, and interviewed people from both sides of the recent Palestinian-Israeli battleground in the ruins of Gaza.
She witnessed what happened when the military dictatorship of Nigeria clashed bloodily with ordinary citizens in the Niger Delta, over the presence of Big Petroleum. She even engaged in an on-air political argument with then-President Bill Clinton, whose administration she constantly pestered with her insistent inquiries.
Often, when police braced press members covering demonstrations, she was arrested along with everyone else. In fact, over the years Goodman has met resistance on a regular, sometimes daily basis in her line of work, mostly from sources trying to avoid the spotlight.
Why does she put herself through that? Because that’s what a reporter does.
Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s urgent documentary, Steal This Story, Please!, introduces us to one of the most remarkable information gatherers of our time. As co-founder and host of the New York-based daily independent radio-TV-internet news program, Democracy Now!, Goodman’s mission is to identify progressive political causes, chase down the participants—as well as their opponents—and get to the heart of the matter, live and in person. As one of the doc’s subjects says, “For her the center of the action is what’s happening on the street.”
Goodman was born and spent her early years in Bay Shore and Islip, Long Island. As the granddaughter of a Jewish Orthodox rabbi and the daughter of a politically progressive physician, she learned by example the value of approaching the moral high ground with a healthy sense of skepticism. In Goodman’s words, “It came from my Jewish education to ask questions and take nothing for granted.”
By the time the Harvard graduate hooked up as a reporter and producer with Pacifica Radio—broadcasting to Bay Area listeners on KPFA, in combination with other Pacifica stations across the country—she had established herself as one of the nation’s leading radio news voices.
Then as now Goodman and her program, Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report, served as a needed alternative to rightwing talk-show radio in the era of media conglomerates and the internet, with the attendant homogenization of the conservative agenda. She showed up in numerous contexts, backed largely by herself, with no large newsroom or broadcast organization behind her.
Fellow broadcaster Nermeen Shaikh, a Democracy Now! comrade, appreciates Goodman for “expanding the frame of political discussions, to include people on the margins.” Those “marginal folks” include the inhabitants of East Timor, the Southeast Asian island nation that gained its independence from Indonesia after a violent struggle in 2002. Or figures like American activist Mumia Abu-Jamal from Philadelphia, who went from death row to political prominence, and had his controversial death sentence overturned with help from Goodman and her reporting.
Goodman asked her listeners: “Why did George W. Bush invade Iraq in 2003?” The most popular assumption was that it was misguided revenge for the 9/11 attacks. Goodman sought answers from ordinary Iraqis as well as from aggrieved New Yorkers. Her conclusion was that it was a case of the U.S. “waging war on another innocent population.”
In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack, Goodman suggested that air quality reports from the scene of destruction had been covered up for political reasons—her editorializing even included an inadvertent on-air coughing spell. Goodman is the definition of indefatigable. Veteran filmmakers Tessin and Deal (Citizen Koch) run themselves ragged trying to keep up with her.
Amy Goodman appears in-person at the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley on April 18 and 19, 6:30pm both evenings, with W. Kamau Bell moderating the Q&A on April 19; rialtocinemas.com/coming-soon-elm/steal-this-story-elm. More info about ‘Steal This Story, Please’: stealthisstory.org.
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In theaters now.
