Final Rating: 3/5
Steal This Story, Please! begins with a sequence of investigative journalist Amy Goodman following Trump’s energy advisor Wells Griffith at the 2019 U.N. climate summit. Goodman repeatedly asks him about Trump claiming climate change is a hoax. When met with silence, she occasionally interjects “are you not speaking to press at this event?” After walking through the entire venue, Griffith finally escapes into an office. Goodman waits outside and announces that Griffith promised her his card, so she’ll catch her breath and wait for that.
From directors Tia Lessen and Carl Deal, Steal This Story is a profile of Goodman, founder of the news program Democracy Now! Tracking Goodman’s entire career from her origins in radio to her coverage of Trump’s second term, Steal This Story is mostly a portrait of a journalist refusing to join the mainstream media machine. At the same time, the film speaks to the importance of independent media, often contrasting Goodman’s own coverage with coverage of the same events by corporate media outlets.
In both goals, Steal This Story is alright, but in failing to commit fully to one or the other, it loses its sense of urgency. In the end it feels more like a feel-good story about a life well-lived than the warning about the consolidation of the media landscape that it often hints at.
Steal This Story devotes a significant amount of time to Goodman’s greatest hits. She was one of the first Americans to report on the conditions in East Timor; her reporting on Chevron’s business in Nigeria would win her a George Polk Award; in advance of the 2000 election, she conducted an impromptu hour-long phone interview with President Bill Clinton which nearly got her banned from the White House. All of these events and more are presented in the film through interviews with Goodman and her colleagues.
While some time is occasionally spent on the effects of her reporting – the United States eventually halting weapons sales to Indonesia, for example – Lessen and Deal are usually too eager to move to the next story, rather than letting the audience sit with what they’ve just heard.
On the one hand, Goodman’s life as a reporter is fast-paced; every story she’s done has been followed almost immediately by another story. On the other hand, splitting focus between so many stories robs the impact of each. Goodman’s reporting on the 2016 North Dakota access pipeline protests is brought up late into the film and left behind too quickly in favour of pivoting into Trump’s presidency.
Ironically, the strongest parts of the film aren’t even Goodman’s greatest hits. Instead, Steal This Story really shines when it uses Democracy Now!’s footage alongside reporting from other outlets to show the fearlessness of independent journalists. The best sequence in the movie begins with Goodman talking about climate change before moving into a montage of CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News anchors talking about floods and forest fires, each time stating a variation of “nobody knows what’s happening to cause this!”
Another memorable scene shows Goodman interviewing pro-Palestine protestors staging a sit-in in New York’s Grand Central Station in October 2023. Goodman’s interviews and commentary draw attention to a group of people refusing to stand by while genocide is committed in their names. The documentary then cuts to the same footage being used on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, with Hannity decrying the “horrific levels of violence and antisemitism” present among this group of peaceful protesters.
Steal This Story uses Goodman’s life to highlight the necessity of independent reporting. Through Goodman, it’s also made clear how difficult it is to remain independent in a world where CNN and CBS will soon be owned by the same company, itself owned by a man friendly with the owner of Fox News. This is the core of what really works about Steal This Story, Please!, but it’s not quite what Lessen and Deal seem most interested in. Instead, Lessen and Deal focus too much on the face behind the camera, only scratching the surface of what her reporting has actually achieved.
Steal This Story, Please! was seen during the 2026 Hot Docs film festival.
