“Dark Alliance”: The Story Behind the Crack Cocaine Explosion | Film Review: "Kill The Messenger"

Film Review: 'Kill the Messenger'

Variety‎ - Sep 2014

Based on the life of investigative reporter Gary Webb, who sparked firestorms with his .... Screenplay, Peter Landesman, based on the books “Dark Alliance” by Gary Webb and “Kill the ... ‎Explore: jeremy renner

Reaching a New Generation

In seeking to discredit Gary Webb as a journalistic colleague, the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post had only undermined their own credibility in the public mind and among other working journalists in the field. These three news companies, like a number of others, are today struggling to maintain credibility at a time when U.S. public trust in the news media is at an all-time low.

Webb’s former employer, the San Jose Mercury News, while still the paper of record in California’s Silicon Valley, has long lost its luster as a bright, shining place to work for ambitious young reporters and editors climbing their way to the top of the news industry. If anything, the Mercury News is renowned these days for being the “newspaper that almost seized the future.”

And as for the newspaper’s groundbreaking “Dark Alliance” series: The late Gary Webb got the story right back then and he still has it right today. The 500-page book he researched and published after leaving the newspaper business, Dark Alliance (Seven Stories Press, 1998), sets the bar high for solid news reporting and has already become a classic work of American journalism.

The new Hollywood movie “Kill the Messenger,” regardless of how the Big Media Feeds may rate it, sets the long-buried ghost of “Dark Alliance” free to haunt the corporate press giants that once killed it and to exact its own brand of karmic justice on them — the best kind of justice there is: inspiring a new generation of journalists in the Internet age to get out there and investigate, expose and report the truths that those in authority would rather keep hidden.

“The only way you’re going to do effective journalism is to be truly independent,” Webb once said. “It’s a difficult thing to do, but [investigative journalists] George Seldes and I.F. Stone did it. There’s no reason modern-day journalists can’t do it too. You don’t get 401-Ks and health benefits, but at least you get to tell the truth.”

Brian Covert is an independent journalist, author, and university lecturer based in western Japan. He is a contributing writer to Project Censored, his most recent piece included in Censored 2015: Inspiring We the People, titled “Rewriting Apartheid: News Media Whitewashing of South Africa and the Legacy of Nelson Mandela.”  http://www.globalresearch.ca/dark-alliance-the-story-behind-the-crack-cocaine-explosion/5411190

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