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Amy Goodman’s Good Example

Columbia Journalism Review · Susie Banikarim · last updated

A documentary that resonates, why the press needs to pay more attention to Truth Social madness, and an impressive investigation from the Post and Courier.

On November 12, 1991, Amy Goodman, an investigative journalist who was then a producer at WBAI Radio, and Allan Nairn, a correspondent for The New Yorker, were in East Timor covering the memorial of a man killed by the Indonesian army, when soldiers opened fire on the mourners, killing at least two hundred and seventy East Timorese. Goodman and Nairn were violently beaten. Nairn’s skull was fractured.

By the time of the massacre, American media had spent sixteen years largely ignoring Indonesia’s brutal occupation of East Timor, even though the United States government had financed, trained, and armed the Indonesian army. “Most Americans never heard of this pure hell on earth,” Goodman says in a new documentary about her life and career, Steal This Story, Please!