The craftsmanship of boots on the ground – go to the place where a story performs, speak to people despite the physical and emotional risks and report the facts – is declining, victim of podcasting, opinion, narrowing of press information and intimidation by a certain president with orange skin.
Telling the truth has always been difficult, but it’s more difficult than ever today.
This is why the new documentary on the progressive journalist Amy Goodman, “Fly this story, please!”, Is a window on the old -fashioned journalism in shoe leather (it probably does not wear leather) which has profoundly led it to build a left audience which undoubtedly makes Maga Fou.
Documentarians and longtime partners Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (“Citizen Koch”, “Fahrenheit 9/11”) admitted that they had made the film on Goodman, a friend and colleague, in part to face their concern about the decline of press freedom in general and independent journalism in particular.
“We were looking for ways to face the madness of the world,” said the Telluride agreement, where he and Lessin show the film. “We were attracted by the story of Amy. The way she has worked in the past three decades is validated in the way the media capitulate in power. ”
Said Lessin: “It gave us a goal in these dark and dark moments, talk about it and make sense of what is happening with Trump.”
Lessin, Deal and Goodman are travelers in the rough world and falling from independent journalism and documentaries. Deal and Lessin worked in close collaboration with Firebrand Michael Moore on “Bowling for Columbine” and “Fahrenheit 11/9”, films that resist the test of time to highlight critical social problems, from the control of firearms to climate change.
The broadcast of Goodman “Democracy Now” has been on the air for 29 years, but it was a fierce defender of the poor, helpless, marginalized people, people forgotten in distant war areas for even longer.
Starting from his early aspiration to be the new Phil Donahue, Goodman experienced a trauma that changes life when she went to the East Timor in the 1970s and was present for a massacre of Civil Oriental Timorais by soldiers of the Indonesian government.
She emerged with a fierce determination to expose the inequalities in which she saw them and to be independent in her journalism, to avoid the star sought after “60 minutes” or to disseminate news from the network and instead, in place, in her own path, almost a woman through the dangerous jungle of short stories. Goodman does not take sponsorship money and has no agreement with what she calls “corporate media”; Instead, it is fully supported by individual subscribers.
During her years by brandishing a microphone, she covered the White House, several wars, the protests standing against a pipeline, street demonstrations and police raids. She goes without fear on the field when he has never been so dangerous for journalists to do exactly that. And while many would call him a defender of the left, Lessin and Deal argue that if Goodman is a defender, she is a defender of his values and the truth.
“The word advocacy was used to reject independent journalists like Amy Goodman,” said Lessin. “What about the Plaidoyer’s commercial networks shown during the invasion of Iraq? The guests in the shows were generals, pleading for the war. They had no equal time for peace activists.”
Selt Deal: “Advocacy is a delicate word, because there is a certain motivation behind what you defend, or for whom you defend, or why you recommend anything. What distinguishes what Amy and “democracy now” is that they do not serve power. They listen to people.
“When you make a documentary, I hope you learn something. You don’t go to it with a preconceived idea. And it may seem really simple, but for me, it was really deep to see Amy repeatedly, especially in the past 12 months on the field during demonstrations, speaking to people,” continued the agreement. “She is not there to participate in the demonstration, but she puts a microphone in front of people and asking them the really simple but obvious question that others do not do it: why are you here?”
Nowadays, there are many “independent” journalists, individuals who have left or who have been left from Legacy Media and can be found on Sublack, YouTube and Tiktok. Admittedly, Goodman was a pioneer in this regard.
But the most important distinction, it seems to me, is his will to always go out and to expose the facts, practical or otherwise.
“Knight this story, please!” Play at Telluride and seek distribution.
