Amy Goodman has been a fearless journalist for more than four decades; she says her Jewish roots made her that way
The documentary ‘Steal This Story, Please!’ shows Goodman’s journey to co-founding ‘Democracy Now!’ and her plans to keep fighting censorship.
Amy Goodman recounts how her Judaism shaped her approach to journalism in ‘Steal This Story, Please!’ Courtesy of Right Livelihood/Wolfgang Schmidt)
By Olivia Haynie November 12, 2025
Decades into her journalism career, Amy Goodman is not just as sharp as ever, but also in great physical shape. In the opening scene of Steal This Story, Please!, a documentary about her life, she chases P. Wells Griffith III, an international energy and climate adviser to President Donald Trump, around the 2018 United Nations Climate Summit, trying to get a quote. She is undaunted by stairways and corridors as Griffith literally runs from her.
By the end of the film, directed by Citizen Koch directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, audiences will realize that such physical exertion is light work for Goodman, co-founder and executive producer of the radio and television broadcast news program Democracy Now! Through interviews with Goodman and her colleagues, as well as archival footage from Goodman’s career, viewers are taken from Goodman’s childhood in Bay Shore, Long Island, to her years leading the incredibly successful independent news outlet. She has been arrested multiple times over the course of her career and has found herself at the end of a weapon more than once.
Goodman says she was inspired to become a journalist by her younger brother Daniel, who, as a child, wrote a newspaper for the family. In the Letters to the Editor section, her family would debate current issues, such as the Vietnam War.
“It came from my Jewish education that you asked questions and that you take nothing for granted,” Goodman says in the film. “And the way you deal with the world is with intense curiosity and not being afraid to stand by your principles.”
Her maternal grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi who, Goodman says, “would accept all questioning.” Her parents, who were involved with local peace groups and integration efforts in Bay Shore, also inspired her passion for social justice.
Steal This Story, Please!, which is having its New York City premiere at DOC NYC, feels particularly poignant, coming at a moment when American press freedom is under attack in new and aggressive ways. The Trump Administration has attempted to undermine legacy media and cut funding for public broadcasts in record amounts and conservative figures have been suing the press for libel. Goodman’s story models the viability and necessity of independent journalism that doesn’t back down in the face of censorship.
Goodman has always distinguished herself by covering news from across the globe, and not just focusing on stories that mainstream Western audiences typically care about. Occasionally, her work involves putting herself in harm’s way. In November 1991, her reporting on the Santa Cruz massacre of Timorese by the American-backed Indonesian military landed her in a prison in Timor. After the 9/11 attack, she stayed in the Democracy Now! offices in Chinatown for several straight days, and still suffers a chronic cough from the chemical exposure. Officials in Morton County, North Dakota, charged her with criminal trespassing for reporting on protests at the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.
Nevertheless, Goodman has continued to pursue investigative stories and highlight perspectives other broadcast media overlooks. As the war in Gaza raged on, Goodman brought both Israelis and Palestinians affected by the conflict onto Democracy Now!
Reflecting on the repression of the media today, Goodman references the White Rose, a group of university students who fought the Nazi regime in Germany by publishing critical pamphlets. At the end of their fourth pamphlet they declared, “We will not be silent.”
“Those words should be the Hippocratic Oath of the media today,” Goodman says.
Steal This Story, Please! is showing at DOC NYC on Nov. 13 and 14.
