Steal This Story, Please! (Deal and Lessin, 2025)
“When you hear someone speak, it’s less likely you’ll want to destroy them.”
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham kicks off on Thursday, April 16. Local residents and attendees who want the opportunity to screen the Amy Goodman profile, Steal This Story, Please! need to mark their calendars, since the film drew was placed in the Thursday afternoon window. While there will be three festival encore screenings for award winners on Sunday afternoon, it is possible that the weekday screening will be Triangle residents’ one shot to see the film on the big screen. The festival screening includes a live Q&A after the film, although I have not yet been able to confirm who will be at the Q&A.
While the documentary occasionally plays like a Greatest Hits album for Goodman’s radio show, Democracy Now!, it is informative and has at least some reflection mixed in with its adulation. If that sounds like a back-handed compliment, I don’t mean it as such. Journalists committed to pushing beyond political and corporate propaganda are essential to America’s increasingly shaky democratic institutions. But the festival, like the city that hosts it, leans left in a purplish state, so I do wonder sometimes whether films such as this one play differently in areas where they are not preaching to the choir.
I also wonder whether the audiences that are left-leaning will do as well as Goodman or her subjects in applying the same critical rigor to those shilling propaganda on either side of the political spectrum. Of course, the notion that Goodman, Democracy Now!, or any journalists who hasn’t sold her integrity for easy access is biased is one of the laziest takes in a political landscape increasingly willing to lie, evade, or obfuscate rather than answer simple, direct questions. Early in the documentary, Goodman interviews an increasingly testy Bill Clinton who chides her for allegedly being “hostile” simply because she asked him policy questions rather than doing a get-out-the-vote cheerleader piece. In a bizarre postscript, Goodman recalls both her broadcast bosses and the politician’s handlers being angry with her over Clinton’s unwillingness to simply hang up the phone.
That exchange is in marked contrast to the depressingly familiar non-exchange that opens the film, as Trump climate-change advisor Wells Griffith III, wide-eyed in panic, runs away from Goodman, claiming that a reporter asking questions is “harassment” and refusing to even parrot the administration’s talking points to anyone who might question, much less disagree with them. The difference that a quarter-century seems to make is not in the bias of the questions or the party of those dodging them, rather it is in the audience’s increasing willingness to buy into the “crooked media” myth and demonize those who are exposing the hypocrisies of their own idols rather than only ever applying scrutiny to the opposition.
Perhaps because of those broader sociological shifts, one of the more important topics in the film is Goodman’s coverage of Israeli/Palestinian violence. She is forthright about her family history and heritage without using as an excuse for partisanship, using her platform to give voice to the marginalized and oppressed, irrespective of nationality, race, religion, or ethnicity.
One more cheeful bit in an otherwise somber documentary is when Steal This Story, Please! tells how Goodman’s brother, David, ran a family “newspaper” which became the forum through which domestic conflicts were documented, grievances voiced, and — most importantly — civility and respect within conflict was taught. These scenes were a bittersweet reminder that the years of her childhood (and my own) were not simply better, more peaceful times, but rather times in which we believed that honest dialogue might resolve many conflicts without resorting to violence. Juxtapose these scenes with later scenes of Donald Trump inciting violence against (among others) journalists, and we get a snap shot — not of how Goodman has changed the world but how the world has changed around her while she has fought to hold constant a set of values and beliefs that inform her work.
Tickets for Steal This Story, Please! are available at the festival box office.
