At a moment when the American media landscape is consolidating at the top and fragmenting at the edges, a new documentary spotlights one of the most durable experiments in independent journalism in the United States. Steal This Story, Please! traces the career of Amy Goodman and the growth of Democracy Now! from a scrappy radio broadcast carried on a handful of stations into a global news platform broadcast on more than 1,400. The film is directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, longtime collaborators whose work includes Trouble the Water, on Hurricane Katrina survivors, and Citizen Koch, on money and power in American politics.

Lessin and Deal began the project in the wake of Donald Trump’s first presidency, as attacks on the press intensified and corporate consolidation accelerated. At the film’s release, those pressures have only intensified. Drawing on decades of archival footage, from East Timor in the 1990s to Israel’s genocide in Gaza in the present, the documentary situates Goodman’s reporting within a broader argument about journalism’s purpose: scrutinizing the powerful and amplifying those systematically excluded from the stories they tell.

The film’s release has run into some of the same barriers it documents. Despite winning audience awards across the festival circuit, Steal This Story, Please! has struggled to secure traditional distribution, instead building an audience through independent screenings and word of mouth — an echo of the grassroots model that sustained Democracy Now! itself.

Alex N. Press spoke with Goodman and Lessin about the conditions under which political documentaries get made, the gap between what mainstream media claims audiences what and what they actually seek out, and what it means to build a media system that answers to those people rather than to the institutions that prefer their silence.