Possibly the most insightful statement ever made by a journalist was from Gary Webb, who killed himself in 2004, years after the CIA and media\u00a0rivals destroyed his career and credibility.<\/p>\n
I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I\u2019d enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn\u2019t been, as I\u2019d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn\u2019t written anything important enough to suppress.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Now Hollywood is making a film, called Kill the Messenger, about the San Jose Mercury News reporter. Webb\u00a0briefly created a national scandal in 1996 by exposing how the CIA-backed Contras in Latin America\u00a0had\u00a0funded their guerrilla war through trafficking crack cocaine to African American communities in the US, with the knowledge of the CIA and other US agencies. The scandal quickly subsided\u00a0because the CIA and other journalists \u2013 from the New York Times, the Washington Post and especially from the LA Times, who had been scooped on their own patch by Webb \u2013 waged a campaign of vilification. The toll eventually led Webb\u00a0to take his own life.<\/p>\n
It should be welcome news that his original revelations will be heard by a new generation, and that the US media’s hand-in-glove relationship to the US intelligence agencies will get national exposure.<\/p>\n
A story like Webb’s ought to remind us that the CIA, the NSA and other US agencies are not there ultimately to “do good”, not even to serve us, the people, but to\u00a0help\u00a0prop up a world order that benefits a small, greedy global elite and to\u00a0spread fear and misinformation\u00a0among the rest of us to keep us divided and obedient. And the media’s role is to serve that same global elite, rarely to hold it to account. That was the mistake made by Webb and briefly by his news editors, who quickly abandoned Webb after\u00a0more senior colleagues on bigger\u00a0papers\u00a0taught them what journalism is really about.<\/p>\n
But I fear Hollywood’s interest should be read in different terms. It signifies a realisation by movie execs that Webb’s revelations are now old enough to constitute “history”, no more threatening to the contemporary\u00a0reputations of the CIA or the US media than filming Mutiny on the Bounty was to the modern British navy.<\/p>\n
Hollywood knows that where there’s a good story, there’s money to be made from us – audiences only too happy\u00a0to be outraged at injustice but also only too wiling to believe such “ancient” injustices\u00a0offer no lessons for the present. For that reason,\u00a0it is doubtful Kill the Messenger’s viewers\u00a0will emerge from the film more\u00a0critical news consumers.\u00a0They will still trust their\u00a0daily paper and the\u00a0TV news, and still assume that when\u00a0all the\u00a0president’s men tell them\u00a0of\u00a0events on distant shores \u2013 from Venezuela to Iran, Syria and Ukraine \u2013 they are being told\u00a0the unvarnished truth.<\/p>\n