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All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone | |
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Directed by | Fred Peabody |
Produced by |
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Cinematography | John Westheuser [1] |
Edited by |
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Music by | Mark Korven [1] |
Production company | White Pine Pictures [1] |
Distributed by | Super Channel Société Radio-Canada |
Release date |
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Running time | 91 minutes |
Country | Canada |
Language | English |
All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone is a 2016 Canadian documentary film directed by Fred Peabody. It had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2016. The film profiles several independent journalists inspired by the late I. F. Stone, a Washington-based independent journalist who published I.F. Stone’s Weekly from 1953 to 1971.
The film follows several independent, investigative journalists who have been inspired by the example of I. F. Stone (1907–89), who was known for digging into public records and back-page stories to track down and expose stories the mainstream corporate news media were ignoring. We see the challenges these reporters face today as they dig for the truth, rather than acting as “stenographers to power”. John Carlos Frey investigates the cover-up of mass graves of undocumented immigrants who died while crossing the U.S./Mexico border. The film looks at independent journalistic investigations of governments dating back to the 1960s and manages to retain a nonpartisan point of view.
All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone is a theatrical documentary created by a team of Emmy Award-winning filmmakers, who subscribed to I. F. Stone’s newsletter in their teens. It was produced in co-operation with Jeremy J. Stone, the son of I.F. Stone. Oliver Stone was executive producer.
"All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I.F. Stone" is an urgent and fascinating documentary. Even if you belong to the choir it’s preaching to, it has the rare distinction of being a movie you can agree and argue with at the same time. The title makes it sound like a portrait of I.F. Stone, the trend-setting investigative journalist (he died in 1989) who in his highly influential self-published newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, tweaked and railed against the sins of the U.S. government — and the mainstream media, though back then it was known simply as, you know, journalism — from the early ’50s through the early ’70s. Stone, you could argue, was the missing link between Thomas Paine and the Internet. "All Governments Lie" treats him as the original political blogger, though it doesn’t offer much more than a thumbnail sketch of Stone. His gadfly spirit hovers over the movie, but his life and work occupy maybe 10 minutes of it. [2]
The movie tips its hat to people like Amy Goodman, whose global news program "Democracy Now!" straddles radio, TV, and the Web, and John Carlos Frey, who we see reporting a cataclysmic story about 200 Mexican immigrants whose bodies were discovered in mass graves in Brooks County, Texas, 70 miles from the border. Mostly, though, "All Governments Lie" focuses on big game like the run-up to the Iraq War, which it uses to illustrate the thesis that the mainstream media — all of it — has become a bought-and-paid-for tool of government and corporate power. [2]
All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception and the Spirit of I.F. Stone: A suitably provocative Canadian documentary that premiered at TIFF 2016 and returns for a run at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, All Governments Lie borrows its title from a saying by I. F. Stone, an American investigative journalist whose long-running weekly newsletter set a standard for those who speak truth to power. [3]
This timely doc from Vancouver filmmaker Fred Peabody examines the importance of independent journalism in a media landscape defined by unprecedented dishonesty on the part of politicians, fake news and compromised media conglomerates increasingly reluctant to investigate or criticize government policies. [4]
Director Fred Peabody's film shows the example I. F. Stone set for modern muckrakers such as Michael Moore, Glenn Greenwald and Amy Goodman, all of whom emphasize the importance of independent journalism in an age when so much of the media is controlled by the rich and powerful and when so much news and opinion - especially in the age of Trump - seems entirely unencumbered by facts. [3]
Film Journal International's Chris Barsanti, in one of the film's only negative reviews, wrote that the "Agitprop denunciatory takedown of corporate news doesn’t do justice to I.F. Stone’s wit or insight." [5] Barsanti's criticism highlighted that the film "takes a valid critique of the deadening effect corporate-government synergy can have on mainstream media’s ability to truly afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, and undercuts it with poor logic and simplistic argument." [5]
All Governments Lie received an Emmy nomination for “Outstanding Politics and Government Documentary” after it was broadcast on STARZ.
The film received the Directors Guild of Canada “Alan King Award for Excellence in Documentary”
It was also a short-listed nominee for the Donald Brittain Award at the 6th Canadian Screen Awards.
Frontline is an investigative documentary program distributed by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. Episodes are produced at WGBH in Boston, Massachusetts. The series has covered a variety of domestic and international issues, including terrorism, elections, environmental disasters, and other sociopolitical issues. Since its debut in 1983, Frontline has aired in the U.S. for 39 seasons, and has won critical acclaim and awards in broadcast journalism. It has produced over 750 documentaries from both in-house and independent filmmakers, 200 of which are available online.
Amy Goodman is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Her investigative journalism career includes coverage of the East Timor independence movement, Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara, and Chevron Corporation's role in Nigeria.
Democracy Now! is a left-wing hour-long TV, radio, and Internet news program based in Manhattan and hosted by journalists Amy Goodman, Juan González, and Nermeen Shaikh. The show, which airs live each weekday at 8 a.m. Eastern Time, is broadcast on the Internet and via more than 1,400 radio and television stations worldwide.
Isidor Feinstein Stone was an American investigative journalist, writer, and author.
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Jeff B. Cohen is an American journalist, media critic, professor, and the founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog group in the US. He is a retired associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College, where he was an endowed chair and founding Director of the Park Center for Independent Media. He was formerly a lawyer for the ACLU and authored or coauthored five books that criticize media bias, mainly written with 2012 California Congressional District 2 candidate, Norman Solomon, who missed the "top two" runoff by only 174 votes. Between 1997 and 2002, Cohen was a regular commentator for Fox News Channel's Fox News Watch, for MSNBC and CNN. He appeared in Outfoxed, a documentary critical of Fox News, and other documentaries.
The 9/11 truth movement encompasses a disparate group of adherents to a set of overlapping conspiracy theories that dispute the general consensus of the September 11 attacks that a group of Al-Qaeda terrorists had hijacked four airliners and crashed them into the Pentagon and the original World Trade Center Twin Towers, which consequently collapsed. The primary focus is on missed information that adherents allege is not adequately explained in the official National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) reports, such as the collapse of 7 World Trade Center. They suggest a cover-up and, at the least, complicity by insiders.
The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit news organization based in Emeryville, California. It was founded in 1977 as the nation’s first nonprofit investigative journalism organization, and has since grown into a multi-platform newsroom, with investigations published on the Reveal website, public radio show and podcast, video pieces and documentaries and social media platforms, reaching over a million people weekly. The public radio show and podcast, “Reveal,” co-produced with PRX, is CIR’s flagship distribution platform, airing on 588 stations nationwide. The newsroom focuses on reporting that reveals inequities, abuse, and corruption, and holds those responsible accountable.
The Roy H. Park School of Communications is one of five schools at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, New York, United States. The school is named after media executive Roy H. Park, who lived in Ithaca and who served on the board of trustees at Ithaca College for many years.
Martyn Burke is a Canadian director, novelist and screenwriter from Toronto, Ontario.
Jeremy Scahill is an American investigative journalist, writer, a founding editor of the online news publication The Intercept, and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which won the George Polk Book Award. His book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield was published by Nation Books on April 23, 2013. On June 8, 2013, the documentary film of the same name, produced, narrated and co-written by Scahill, was released. It premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
Laura Poitras is an American director and producer of documentary films.
Mark Korven is a Canadian musician and composer for film and television. His work includes the music on the sci-fi horror cult film Cube (1997), collaborations with director Robert Eggers on the period horror films The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019), and Scott Derrickson's The Black Phone (2022).
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Dirty Wars is a 2013 American documentary film, which accompanies the book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield by Jeremy Scahill. The film is directed by Richard Rowley, and written by Scahill and David Riker.
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The Intercept is an online American nonprofit news organization that publishes articles and podcasts.
Myra MacPherson is an American author, biographer, and journalist known for writing about politics, the Vietnam War, feminism, and death and dying. Although her work has appeared in many publications, she had a long affiliation with The Washington Post newspaper. She was hired in 1968 by Post executive editor Ben Bradlee to write for the paper's Style section, and remained with the Post for over two decades until 1991. While with the title, she profiled those involved in Watergate, covered five presidential campaigns, women's rights issues and wrote a series on Vietnam veterans that led to her 1984 book Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation. It was the first trade book to examine post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and, according to Vietnam expert Arnold R. Isaacs, one of the first to "break the long national silence" about the war and remains one of the most moving and important works on the Vietnam bookshelf." The author Joseph Heller wrote: "MacPherson's book belongs with the best of the works on Vietnam."
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