![]() It isn’t just other newspapers that are presented as villains in “Kill the Messenger.” Webb’s own editors, Jerry Ceppos and Anna Simons, played by Oliver Platt and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, are depicted as craven and disloyal for their refusal to defend Webb, who was banished to the newspaper’s Cupertino bureau after questions about his reporting began to surface, and who soon quit. (Writing in response to The Post’s critical coverage of the “Dark Alliance” series, the paper’s then-ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, wrote in November 1996 that the newspaper “showed more passion for sniffing out the flaws in San Jose’s answer than for sniffing out a better answer themselves.”) The film presents the reporter (played with roguish intensity by Jeremy Renner) as a misunderstood crusader whose reporting, while arguably flawed, was unfairly maligned by larger newspapers, The Washington Post among them. That, in a nutshell, is the point of “Kill the Messenger”: Webb was right, but railroaded. But it helped drive home - maybe even to skew - Webb’s message in a way that would blind some readers to its underlying truths, while ultimately destroying him. This, of course, was also the central premise of Webb’s 1996 “ Dark Alliance” series, which originally appeared on the Mercury News Web site under a logo featuring a crack pipe superimposed on the CIA seal. The rationale goes as follows: As long as the drug proceeds were being funneled back to support Nicaragua’s CIA-sponsored freedom fighters - i.e., the “good” guys - the ends justified the means. government only paid lip service to the War on Drugs while turning a blind eye to - if not actually condoning - the sale of Central American cocaine to our inner-city youth. Delivered by the likes of President Reagan and his wife, Nancy, these “Just Say No”-era clips set up the audience for the film’s central premise: that the U.S. The movie starts like a documentary, with a montage of anti-drug sound bites from the 1980s, mixed with archival news footage of the war in Nicaragua. ![]() In between is a generous schmear of insinuation. Inspired by the true story of Gary Webb - the San Jose Mercury News reporter known for a controversial series of articles suggesting a link between the CIA, the California crack epidemic and the Nicaraguan Contras - this slightly overheated drama begins and ends with innuendo. ![]() Implication is the hallmark of “ Kill the Messenger.”
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