Amy Goodman, the veteran host of Democracy Now!, is bringing her documentary celebrating 30 years of the progressive news program to the Roxie Theater in the Mission for a weeklong run starting April 17. The film, cheekily titled Steal This Story, Please!, chronicles three decades of the show's independent journalism — and Goodman is making the rounds encouraging San Franciscans to come out and engage.

Look, we'll be upfront: Democracy Now! and The Dissent don't exactly share a political family tree. Goodman's brand of progressive media has spent decades championing bigger government, more regulation, and the kind of sprawling federal programs that tend to make our wallets lighter and our bureaucracies heavier.

But here's the thing — and we mean this sincerely — independent media matters. All of it. In an era where legacy outlets are hemorrhaging trust and consolidating under fewer corporate umbrellas, the fact that a scrappy, independently funded news operation has survived 30 years is genuinely worth acknowledging. You don't have to agree with someone's conclusions to respect their commitment to operating outside the mainstream machine.

The Roxie itself is a Mission District institution, one of the oldest continuously operating cinemas in the country, and exactly the kind of venue that keeps San Francisco's cultural identity from being fully swallowed by algorithm-driven content farms. Supporting independent theaters is something that transcends political lanes.

So should you go? If you're a Goodman fan, obviously. If you're not, it might still be worth the ticket price to understand how the other side of the media landscape thinks, funds itself, and builds an audience without corporate backing. That's a lesson worth learning regardless of where you fall on the spectrum.

Just don't expect us to start running segments on defunding anything except the city's bloated administrative overhead.