Whoever your favorite journalist might be, they are probably a fan and/or follower of Amy Goodman, who is celebrating 30 years as the founder and host of Democracy Now!, an award-winning, listener-sponsored program that airs on 1,500 TV and radio stations daily. Goodman is the subject of a documentary, Steal This Story, Please!, playing at IFC Center, and was recently fêted at Riverside Church by a cross section of celebrities and activists.

“Angela Davis spoke, and so did the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who just won a Pulitzer Prize for his essays in The New Yorker,” Goodman told me, ticking off the writers and musicians in attendance, including her longtime co-host Juan González and Michael Stipe of R.E.M. “To round out the evening, I said, ‘I think I see someone in the audience who could really wrap this up.’ The boss, Bruce Springsteen, got up and he sang ‘Streets of Minneapolis’ and then all of them got on the stage and sang Patti Smith’s iconic ‘People Have the Power.’”

The accolades are for a woman whose career is the stuff of legend. In 1991, Goodman was beaten by soldiers while reporting on a massacre of 270 people by the Indonesian Army on the Asian island of East Timor. A few years later, her reporting pressured the governor of Louisiana into freeing Moreese Bickham, a man who’d been wrongfully convicted of a double homicide and spent 37 years on death row.

In 2000, Goodman turned a chance encounter with then-President Bill Clinton into a riveting 30-minute grilling on live radio about the North American Free Trade Agreement and other White House policies. (“You have asked........

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