WELL ACTUALLY, THIS IS A DVD PRODUCED BY OLIVER STONE, and it’s an examination of modern
investigative journalism as well as the wasteland that today’s media landscape has
become (particularly in the United States). I.F. Stone was an American journalist (1907-1989)
who spoke truth to power, writing in his weekly newsletter, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, for nearly two
decades. His was a journalism that sought to uncover and highlight the
uncomfortable truths that those in power would rather keep hidden. He wrote during
the era of McCarthyism, through Vietnam and the presidencies of Nixon, Ford, Carter, Regan and
Bush Sr., and challenged conventional wisdom and government party lines.
Famously he said:
“If you want to know about governments, all you
need to know is two words: governments lie.” And “All governments lie but disaster awaits
those countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”
The DVD highlights the emergence in the United
States of modern, investigative journalism that is in such stark contrast to mainstream
corporate media. If Stone were alive today he would be railing against the
power of corporations, in particular their virtual monopoly on news organizations
and how most news reporting today follows, to a great extent, the corporate
agenda, with little opportunity for dissenting voices. Think of the monolithic
news coverage that led up to the Iraq War in 2003 where virtually every news
organization repeated the false claims made by the Bush regime that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,
which was the justification for America’s invasion of that country. Saddam
did not have such weapons. Like the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident
which was the premise for war in Vietnam, where an American warship was supposedly
attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats (the veracity of which has been challenged by some historians today), and that Stone wrote about, whereby the American
government obfuscated the truth, and war was fought for the hidden agendas of political power and economic
gain.
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| I. F. Stone |
Journalists and advocates such as I. F. Stone, Carl
Bernstein, Bill Moyers, Seymour Hersh, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and a younger
generation of investigative reporters and bloggers—Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi,
Jeremy Scahill, Glen Greenwald*, Max Blumenthal, Arron Mate, Ben Norton, Michael Moore, David Corn, Amy Goodman, etc. provide a much needed counterpoint to the faux news we are fed daily though
newspapers and television and social media. And while this is a documentary that focuses on American journalism, we would be complacent with the state of Canadian news reporting at our peril. There are governments and powerful corporations in this country that would be more than happy to have only their version of the truth presented.
So, get the facts. Do your research. Verify-verify-verify. Such are the watchwords of true journalists, not the puppet-speak yap-yap of talking-heads bought
and paid for by the corporations.
Anyway, this is a helpful DVD to watch, and gives
food for thought for starving brain cells.
Cheers
*In 2013, Glen Greenwald made public whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s documentation exposing the American intelligence community’s massive and unregulated surveillance network.
He also has recently exposed high-level corruption in the Brazilian government
and judiciary, receiving death threats for his efforts.
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