IDFA — Steal This Story, Please! Why Independent Journalism Matters More Than Ever
© Image courtesy of IDFA / Steal This Story, Please! (2025), directed by Carl Deal & Tia Lessin. All rights reserved.
During the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) 2025, Stefanie Gordin watched Steal This Story, Please! by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin. The documentary follows American investigative journalist Amy Goodman, offering a persistent look at her decades-long fight for independent reporting – a fight that resonates far beyond the United States, raising urgent questions about press freedom, media independence, and the role of journalism in democracy today.
I knew Democracy Now! as a news platform with an enormous global reach, but I had never really seen who was behind it, or how radically uncompromising its model is, operating without government funding, corporate sponsors, or commercial pressure. From the very first scenes, it becomes obvious that Amy Goodman is not a reporter who keeps a polite, journalistic distance. We watch her attempt to question a prominent politician. He dodges her, slips away, tries to dissolve into the corridors. Goodman refuses to let go. She follows him through rooms, down hallways, across thresholds, steady, persistent, as if the urgency of the question is tied to her feet.
That opening alone feels like a jolt to the system, a wake-up call not just for American journalism, but for journalists everywhere, including here in the Netherlands and Belgium. Because if you are genuinely searching for answers, the documentary reminds us, you must be willing to push. To stay with the question. To go where others won’t. To insist.
Breaking the rules of journalism
The documentary presents Goodman as someone who, for decades, has done what most media companies no longer do, or no longer dare to do: report without the filters of corporate interest, political pressure, or the gravitational force of advertising revenue. We learn how, from a young age, she felt the pull toward writing and journalism within major media institutions, yet found no real access to them. She spent more than ten years as news director at Pacifica Radio’s WBAI-FM in New York before co-founding Democracy Now! in 1996.
“It’s a radically simple model, and at the same time something that feels almost impossible in today’s media landscape.”
The program has survived ever since on donations alone. No advertisers, no corporate sponsors, no government money. Stories are not shaped by whoever pays the bills. It’s a radically simple model, and at the same time something that feels almost impossible in today’s media landscape, especially when we see massive subsidy cuts in Belgium, hitting independent outlets like De Wereld Morgen and MO* magazine, as well as other organizations defending human rights, show how precarious independent reporting has become.
The weight of being there
Throughout the documentary, we move between Goodman’s childhood memories, personal history and her work: her persistence, her discipline, her willingness to show up in places where journalists from the United States and Europe rarely went – or never even considered going – simply because those places were not deemed “newsworthy.”
One striking sequence in the documentary takes us back to 1991. Goodman and her colleague Allan Nairn were reporting on the independence movement in East Timor when they witnessed Indonesian forces opening fire on peaceful demonstrators – what would become known as the Santa Cruz Massacre. Moments later, the soldiers beat Goodman and Nairn severely.
The documentary shows it unfiltered. The rawness. The asymmetry of power. The human lives that vanish in the space between what is recorded and what is ignored. Goodman’s work has always existed in that space, where injustice is visible, but only if someone is willing to stand there long enough to see it.
Her commitment hasn’t softened with time. Today she continues to report on the genocide in Gaza and the wider struggle for Palestinian justice with the same steadiness, the same refusal to look away. What becomes unmistakably clear: Goodman is not simply a journalist. She is a symbol of independent journalism itself – and she has no intention of letting go of that role. Especially not in the United States where press freedoms are again eroding under Trump-era policies, where reporters are attacked during protests, detained, criminalized for doing their job.
The global threat to press freedom
It’s easy to watch the documentary and think: this is an American problem. But the Dutch and Belgian realities are moving in the same direction. The majority of newspapers in the Netherlands are now owned by two major media conglomerates – DPG Media and Mediahuis – while local newsrooms are stripped bare. Clicks and advertising determine which stories see the light of day. Headlines chase traffic rather than truth, often skewing coverage of issues like migration, polarizing public debate, or ignoring long-term attention on crises like Gaza.
Yet independent investigative platforms such as Follow The Money, De Correspondent, or Investico show that it can be done differently, though only with structural support from readers. So does Rephrase Magazine, a platform we launched last year without financial backing, publishing independently and focusing on stories that truly matter. Local journalism is disappearing more and more, in both Belgium and the Netherlands – and with it, a crucial watchdog of democracy. That is something we cannot lose sight of.
Why independence is worth fighting for
Good journalism is slow, expensive, stubborn, and often unprofitable, a reality we also experience at Rephrase Magazine. That is precisely why it is so vulnerable. Steal This Story, Please! shows what happens when the public’s right to information is left to market forces: only infotainment survives. Without independent reporting, power is no longer scrutinized – it is orchestrated.
The question we must ask ourselves: do we want to live in such a world? Where figures like Trump dictate what is newsworthy, where in Russia independent media are banned, replaced by state-controlled outlets, and where in Belgium and the Netherlands media are increasingly bought up by large corporations, with opaque rules and hidden money shaping narratives? When journalism is left to clicks and social media algorithms, false or misleading narratives gain dominance, and the path back to accountability becomes perilously narrow.
“It does not mean being neutral, but being honest; not detached, but integral. It means telling stories no one wants to hear, but everyone needs to know.”
Goodman shows that independence is not an abstract principle, it is a daily choice. It does not mean being neutral, but being honest; not detached, but integral. It means telling stories no one wants to hear, but everyone needs to know.
This is what stayed with me after watching the documentary. There were moments when tears welled up at the disturbing and heart-wrenching images from Gaza, already for so many years – the pain, the suffering, the activism that is necessary. Journalism keeps us human. It preserves democracy.
Perhaps this is exactly what Dutch and Belgian journalism needs today: audiences who understand that independence is not a given, but something we must actively support every day. Radical transparency in the stories we tell, the courage to insist, the refusal to look away. ‘Steal this story’ is not something Goodman says literally, but the documentary embodies it: an invitation to carry these truths forward. Perhaps it is time we take that call seriously, right here in our own media landscape.
Stefanie Gordin is a writer, journalist, and co-founder of Rephrase Magazine.
