Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (and Lessin in particular) are not strangers to the pages of Beyond Chron. The documentaries “Trouble The Water” and “The Janes” (co-directed by Lessin but not Deal) have been previously discussed here.
Opening at the Roxie Theater on April 17, 2026 will be Deal and Lessin’s newest documentary “Steal This Story, Please!” This biographical portrait is likely to be a hit with Bay Area audiences given its subject, “Democracy Now” host and legendary journalist Amy Goodman. The film covers some of the big stories Goodman’s worked on over a several decades-long journalism career as well as providing looks at the reporter’s non-public persona.
This writer interviewed Deal and Lessin over Zoom in preparation for their film’s upcoming local premiere. The text has been lightly edited for readability.
Beyond Chron (BC): I wanted to start by asking both of you about your prior relationship with Amy Goodman. “Trouble The Water” was discussed on “Democracy Now” and I believe “The Janes” were as well. Is there anything else?
Tia Lessin (TL): Yes, and the film Carl and I made together called “Citizen Koch.” In 2008, we had an interview with Amy about “Trouble The Water.” In 2013, about “Citizen Koch.” And then 2022, with “The Janes.” So I’ve been on her show three times. Carl too.
Long before that, we had been listeners to “Democracy Now” and even admirers of Amy. You can’t help but admire the work that she’s done for all of these years. We’ve also crossed paths with her team over the years because we’re also journalists covering things.
I think I first crossed paths with her in 1999 at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, when it was shut down by a coalition of labor organizers, environmental groups, and student activists. I was there with Michael Moore covering it and she was there with “Democracy Now.” But a year later, I actually ended up getting recruited by her team to help cover the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. It was a pilot for a television version of their radio show. I volunteered for the weekend and, really, just shot Amy as she covered both inside the convention center and outside with the protests. I got a little taste of how she did what she did, the kinds of questions she asked, and how unstoppable she was. From that time on, I was certainly intrigued. But it was only in the last few years that we were approached by our producer Karen Ranucci to make this film. Given what’s happening right now around press freedoms, it was a no-brainer. We signed right up.
BC: So you didn’t want to do this in time for “Democracy Now”’s 30th anniversary?
TL: That was total serendipity. (Laughing) We actually thought we’d be finished before then. But there was a lot of material to go through. She had a 30-year archive of incredible field reporting and in-studio reporting, not to mention her home videos. And then COVID got in the way.
It’s complete serendipity that we were able to show up less than two weeks before the “Democracy Now” celebrations. Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith both performed, and we all celebrated this three-decade long program.
BC: From a previous interview, you’ve said that you wanted to pick moments big or small that showed who Amy Goodman is as a person. What was your favorite moment that you put into the film and why?
TL: Good question. Carl?
Carl Deal (CD): My favorite scene is the one where Amy is being interviewed by a 13-year-old middle schooler about why she became a journalist. In that scene, you get to see Amy’s sense of humor and the lightness she brings into the world. But you also learn about her background and why she’s had these values instilled in her. She attributes them to her Jewish education, her family and her upbringing. She tells this hilarious story about being essentially the collection agent for her younger 8-year-old brother’s family newspaper. The idea was that this family newspaper was a way for the family members to debate the big issues of the day. It’s fascinating, and helps you understand who she is, where she came from, where she learned how to be so curious about the world, and so empowered to interrogate the world. You know, some people don’t like to be asked questions, and some people like to engage. [Amy’s] one of those people who just likes to engage. So I really like that scene.
I also have to say [I like] the opening scene of the film where she’s trying to pursue the Trump Administration official who’s trying to avoid answering the question. The man who’s been tasked with promoting the Trump Administration’s climate policy is refusing to talk to journalists about the climate policy. (Laughter) [Amy’s] completely unflappable. [S]he pursues him through this labyrinth[ine] convention center in Katowice, Poland and he’s literally running from her. That scene tells you everything you need to know about Amy Goodman. She’s not going to give up. Also, it’s not just for the sake of pestering people in power. These are really really serious issues. This is the fate of the planet, and this is the representative of the most powerful person on the face of the Earth. Any journalist should be entitled to a response.
TL: So much of journalism these days feels so performative, or at least broadcast journalism [does]. For Amy, it’s not about the theatrics. It’s about getting some hard questions answered, and forcing some accountability. Ultimately, it’s her belief in the power of journalism to make change, which is inspiring.
I guess I have to agree with Carl. I love so many moments in the film. It’s hard, like picking your favorite child. For me, seeing the lighter moments, her playfulness and her silliness, was a surprise. I knew her on-camera persona. It was nice to get to know that side of her. She has a lightness of being [and] incredible comedic timing. Though she works a lot, she likes to play. We enjoyed that side of her as well. People are surprised when they see this film because there are a lot of light moments. There’s some levity even though there’s some difficult material.
I think my other favorite moment is as the film is coming to a close, I feel the energy of that audience and it’s transporting to me. It’s rousing, this feeling that people want to get up and do something. In this moment where we’re all so isolated and we’re watching with so much despair on a daily basis the pain we’re inflicting in this country both here and abroad, the thing that’s going to get us through this is community.
BC: I’m not sure if I should be asking this, but what the heck. Was there a favorite moment that you wanted to include in the movie that you couldn’t?
TL: Oh, so many.
CD (laughing): Never ask a documentary filmmaker that question. It’s painful.
TL: We had to make so many hard choices. She had a 30-year career, and it’s an epic story. She’s covered stories around the world, around the country. We had footage of [that coverage] and outtakes from her own cameras. We had other filmmakers covering [Goodman’s coverage]. So gosh…
You’re in the Bay Area, where the Pacifica Network started. There was a sequence where Amy tells a story about how the Ku Klux Klan bombed the KPFT-Houston radio station in the very early years, when they were just beginning on air. The Klan was not happy with the racially diverse staff and the programming they were putting out. So they strapped dynamite onto the antenna and blew it up. Then [KPFT] actually went back on the air and then the Klan blew it up again with a bigger charge of dynamite. It is just staggering. We had images of the before and after. The local papers covered it. I think it speaks to the threat that journalism is to white supremacy, to totalitarian thinking. I miss that scene. We had to make some very hard choices, but I think it’s sort of a testament to the power of journalism that organizations like the Klan would want to silence it. We see some of that silencing in this day and age. Carl, what would you…
CD: Oh no, absolutely. That’s a good one.
It’s hard. Where would you begin? [“Democracy Now”] is a daily news broadcast, and you can tell six different stories . But we’re making a film. and a film is a different animal.
We had to let go [of] some really poignant moments. In particular, I think Amy and “Democracy Now” were the first to report that in 2004, when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was taken from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti in what Secretary of State Colin Powell said [was a voluntary decision] to step down, it was actually a kidnapping. It was a coup. [Amy] was the first to report it straight from the mouth of the president.
TL: A kidnapping by the U.S. Marines.
CD: She then was the only broadcast journalist on the plane on a mission to bring him back to the Caribbean with Randall Robertson from TransAfrica and Congresswoman Maxine Waters. They went and they retrieved Aristide. She went right along with the delegation and brought him back from a place that he had no connection to, the Central African Republic, where he’d just been dropped off.
That was a really amazing story because it was an example of where the name of the film comes from, which is “Steal This Story,Please!” It’s the idea of trickle-up journalism. [T]he mainstream doesn’t cover breaking news in the same way that Amy Goodman and “Democracy Now” do because [“Democracy Now” is] bringing in marginalized voices, and voices that will nearly always be excluded from the airwaves. In the process of doing that, they also break news, like they did at Standing Rock and with Aristide. So the idea of “Steal This Story, Please” is just “steal this story, tell the real story.”
TL: Your publication does something similar. I’m not sure if it’s a nonprofit or independent, but it certainly tries to pick up stories ignored by the commercial media and the mainstream media.
BC: I was doing a little bit of research on Amy’s life and learned she never got any formal journalism training. In fact, she got her degree in anthropology. How do you think this makes her a better reporter than the products of journalism schools?
TL: Well Carl, you went to journalism school. So maybe you should answer that.
CD: I don’t think she needed to learn the nuts and bolts of how you write a sentence and how you ask questions. I think that was instilled in her from a very early age. [W]hat “Democracy Now” does is appreciate the importance of context, that everything you report on happened in the context of something that happened before.or something that’s happening someplace else.
The structures of institutions that practice journalism kind of limit your ability to bring in the context. Amy and Juan Gonzalez working with Pacifica created an institution that was free [to bring in context]. Not only was it free to listeners and broadcasters and other radio stations and now TV stations, they were free to let people speak.
Speaking personally, I think journalism school will send you down the wrong path. It instills too many procedural rules and it stifles your creativity.
TL: What I think makes Amy’s practice of journalism different is not so much her training but the fact that she created this independence by untethering journalism from corporate and government funding. She believes that she’s accountable to her listeners, and that’s it. I [mean] her audience as she’s on radio, television, and the Internet.
While other journalists are dedicated to reporting the truth accurately and fairly and forcing accountability, they’re tethered by their owners of their news outlets. More and more of those owners are billionaires and multinational corporations who have other interests besides reporting the news. We’ve seen over and over again in recent months: the resign[ations] of great broadcast journalists; print journalists who are being censored; [journalists] being silenced with lawsuits. Some are being arrested like Don Lemon in Minneapolis. Terry Moran: fired by ABC. CBS’ upsetting all of “60 Minutes” [staff] because they were forced to delay their broadcast of their story about CECOT prison in El Salvador. So many of these organizations that own the news have been capitulating to Donald Trump. They’ve been bribing him, they’ve been sanitizing the news. Amy doesn’t need to do that because she doesn’t have corporate sponsors, she doesn’t have hidden strings attached.
CD: And just to add a little bit of context, Tia mentioned the “60 Minutes” debacle. We all read the paper today. Bari Weiss is about to take the hatchet to “60 Minutes,” this revered institution of investigative journalism. No matter what we think about where [journalism] is today, can it get worse? It’s about to.
BC: Oh God, yes. Turning to something a little more pleasant that was brought up by your film, Amy’s Jewish background played a key role in who she is as a person and how she became a reporter. What was the thing that most surprised you about how her Jewish background influenced the person she became?
TL: Interesting…I was particularly moved to hear about her connection to her Jewish upbringing and how it really informed not only her journalism but her humanity. She credits her Jewish education for asking questions, taking nothing for granted, dealing with the world with intense curiosity, and not being afraid to stand by your principles… I would also add infusing humor in some of what she does. [T]hat’s a Jewish trait I’m familiar with as well.
She’s not just Jewish. Her grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi beloved in Brooklyn and her great-grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi in Manhattan. So from both sides of her family, she comes from a deeply religious upbringing. For me, I’m Jewish. I’m the daughter of Holocaust survivors. [A] lot of the questions that have gotten into my filmmaking have had to do with questions about survival, the choices we all make in this world, and the import of the consequences of those choices. So I was really interested to see how Amy’s background informed her choices. I’m not sure if that answered your question.
CD: Let me take a stab at it. I’d say nothing surprised me, because I live and collaborate with a woman of similar pedigree. Somebody who, because of that upbringing, is completely committed and dedicated to doing the right thing and to serving the greater good and the choices that they make. The other person I’m speaking about is Tia Lessin. But I see a lot of similarities in [Amy and Tia] and how they approach the world and what their responsibilities are. It’s because of that background, that deep ingrained knowledge and understanding of what it means to be marginalized but targeted.
TL: I would add that I thought it was important to spend a little time in that background. We live in a time when the extreme Right wing has hijacked Jewish resistance, which has been a history of social and political progressive resistance in the form of civil rights activism, union and labor organizing, The list goes on and on. They’ve used this so-called fight against anti-Semitism to suppress free speech and to marginalize the Left. It’s just important for me to remind myself [Jewish] history is different from what the Right claims.
BC: That leads to my last question. How do you see Amy’s story as disrupting the anti-Semitic trope of being Jewish [equated to] blindly supporting the Israeli government’s heinous militaristic actions?
TL: I would say Amy’s commitment to covering Israel and Palestine in the way that she does is not in spite of her background as a Jew, but because of her commitment to fairness and accuracy in reporting.
CD: The really exciting thing [about] doing what we do is being able to connect people and to break down those kinds of stereotypes that people have. It’s not a lot different in some ways than what Amy and “Democracy Now” do. By bringing personal stories and making you feel connected to people whom we’re not seeing on the other news outlets helps you understand the consequences of our policies. Amy is so relatable and so likable and so admirable in what she does and how she does it that we’re certain people who come in to see this film, no matter what biases or ideas they had when they walk in, they’re going to walk out changed one way or another. That’s what we want to do. We want to disrupt systems [and] corrupt institutions, but we also want to disrupt people. We want people to think differently, to move them to a different place. Whether that’s the Left, the Right, that’s what we’re out to do. And we hope we can accomplish that with this film.
TL: Amy speaks really honestly about her conflicted feelings about the state of Israel. She imagined it when she was growing up as a refuge but she learned it was a refuge for some but not all. We deal with it in a straightforward way and I think [in] a very intimate and revealing way. I’d love this to be a jumping off point for conversations in the American Jewish community about this moment. The fact is the Far Right has exploited the rise in anti-Semitism for political gain and we need to take issue with that and speak out.
(“Steal This Story, Please!” opens at the Roxie Theater (3117-16th Street, SF) on April 17, 2026. Tia Lessin appears in person at the April 17-19 screenings. Amy Goodman will join Lessin in person at the April 18 & 19 screenings. As of this writing, both the April 18 & 19 screenings are sold out. For those interested in getting tickets to other screenings, go here.)
