Amy Goodman has spent three decades asking questions that powerful people would rather not answer. On October 26, 2026, she will answer a few herself at the University of Colorado Boulder, where her new documentary, Steal This Story, Please!, screens at the Dal Ward Athletic Center at 2100 Stadium Drive. The event runs from 3:30 to 6:00 p.m., and it is free and open to the public, with no tickets required. Organizers are advising people to arrive early, since the room is expected to fill.
The film, directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, traces Goodman's life and career and her work on Democracy Now!, the daily independent news program she co-founded with Juan González and Pacifica Radio in 1996. It runs 98 minutes, was edited by Mona Davis with music by Zoë Keating, and had its world premiere at the DC/DOX film festival in Washington, D.C., on June 12, 2025. Its executive producers include Jane Fonda, Rosario Dawson and Tom Morello, and it has collected more than a dozen audience and jury prizes on the festival circuit.
The title is Goodman's own half-joking invitation: take our stories, please. Democracy Now! accepts no advertising or corporate sponsorship, relying instead on listeners and viewers, and its reporting is offered to any outlet willing to carry it. The irony, as reviewers have noted, is that much of the mainstream press rarely takes up the offer until it can no longer ignore a story that Goodman's team broke first.
Goodman's path to that microphone was not a straight one. By her own account, her habit of questioning authority began with her Jewish upbringing, where asking was a form of learning. She applied to work on television's raucous Phil Donahue Show and was turned down. What she had instead was persistence. Her breakthrough came in 1991, when she reported from East Timor on the Indonesian military's massacre of demonstrators in Dili's Santa Cruz cemetery, an atrocity carried out largely with U.S.-made weapons. Goodman and New Yorker writer Allan Nairn were beaten during that reporting; Nairn threw himself over her to shield her from the worst of it. She also walked into Chevron's corporate headquarters in Nigeria, U.S. passport in hand, and came away with a scoop.
The film opens with a scene that has become a signature: Goodman pursuing Donald Trump's then-climate adviser, Wells Griffith, through the corridors of the 2018 United Nations Climate Summit, asking whether the president considers climate change a hoax, and following until he disappears behind a locked door. It moves from there through Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks, to Haiti, to a death row prison in Georgia, and to interviews with journalists inside the Gaza Strip.
Democracy Now! began as a daily election-year program carried on a handful of community radio stations. It expanded into television during the week of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and now airs on well over a thousand public television and radio stations in the United States and around the world. Goodman's honors include the Nieman Foundation's 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, a lifetime achievement award; she was the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel Prize, for developing what the foundation described as an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism. She was also the first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media's Izzy Award, named for the muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, and was later inducted into the center's I.F. Stone Hall of Fame. She has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers.
At Boulder, Goodman will appear in person for a conversation after the screening, joined by Lessin, one of the film's Oscar-nominated directors. Their previous films together include Trouble the Water and Citizen Koch. The discussion will be moderated by Max Boykoff, faculty executive director of CU Boulder's SPIKE Center for Sustainability Education, and the film will be introduced by Hong Vu, faculty director of the Center for Environmental Journalism in the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information.
The pairing of a documentary about independent journalism with a sustainability center is less of a stretch than it might look. The SPIKE Center was launched in summer 2025 with a $10 million gift from CU Boulder alumnus John "Spike" Buckley, an investment the university describes as venture-style, meant to push sustainability teaching across disciplines rather than confine it to one department. It was originally called the Buckley Center for Sustainability Education and was renamed the SPIKE Center in January 2026 to reflect its growing role as a campus hub. Boykoff, a longtime climate communication scholar, has built a career on the question of how environmental stories reach the public, which is the same question at the heart of Goodman's work.
The event is sponsored by KGNU, the listener-supported community station that has served Boulder and Denver since it first signed on in 1978. KGNU grew from a Boulder studio into a two-signal operation, adding a Denver station in 2006, and it runs on the work of more than 200 volunteers with a budget drawn from its audience rather than advertisers. That makes it a natural host for a film about a newsroom funded the same way. KGNU has hosted earlier Colorado screenings of the documentary, including a sold-out Boulder showing at the Boedecker Theater at the Dairy Center for the Arts in May 2026 and a Denver screening at the Sie FilmCenter, both paired with fundraising receptions for the station.
This one is different in scale and in access. The Dal Ward Athletic Center, on the university's athletics campus just off Folsom Avenue and Stadium Drive, gives the event room to be genuinely open: no tickets, no price, first come, first seated. Parking is available in the nearby garage, with public parking on the first level, and visitors navigating by phone are directed to search for 2150 Colorado Avenue. For anyone who has heard Goodman's voice on the radio for years without ever seeing her in a room, the invitation is unusually simple. Come early, take a seat, and steal the story.